[Okular-devel] [okular] [Bug 326230] Wish: play movies given by the RichMedia annotation (LaTeX media9 package)

[Oliver Sander]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326230

--- Comment #5 from Oliver Sander <sander at igpm.rwth-aachen.de> ---
Not trivial, when you look at what RichMedia does.  Apparently, the pdf viewer
is expected to be able to play flash.  When embedding a movie in a pdf file
using LaTeX and media9, the resulting pdf file actually contains a small video
player written in flash, which needs to be run by somebody.

There appear to be (at least) three possible approaches to this problem:

a) Call lightspark from okular (apparently the flash dialect used rules out
using gnash).   That would be the cleanest solution from the okular point of
view: all remaining issues would be lightspark bugs.  Ironing out whatever bugs
there are you would get all the features described in the media9 documentation:
video, sound, 3d content, interactivity etc.

Unfortunately, it is not clear how many lightspark bugs need to be fixed before
getting first results with okular.  In particular, lightspark apparently does
not play the video player flash file that media9 embeds in pdf files:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightspark/+bug/1246050
The maintainer of media9 has been very helpful, and has provided simplified
versions of the player: that's
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightspark/+bug/1246682 and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightspark/+bug/1246690 (the most action has been on
that last one), but the list time I tried (about a year ago), these wouldn't
play either.

Actually I think this would make a nice GSOC project.

b) Tobias suggested to make okular recognize the media9 flash video player,
parse its input arguments, and then send the movie file to phonon instead. 
That way you get the movie playing without having to deal with lightspark.  But
of course you only get movie playing, and no other media9 feature.

c) Albert suggested to extract the flash file, write it in a temporary file,
and make the browser play it.  That's (I guess) also reasonably simply to
implement and comes without external dependencies.  However, it would open a
separate browser window for all kinds of flash content, which is usually not
desired.

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