During my work on VP6 encoder I was contacted by Ruffle developer who was interested in it, one thing led to another and I licensed my decoder for the use there (the main issues were cutting off all the interfaces from NihAV that are not needed for it and selecting the license). But it’s over and they say it’s working fine. Meanwhile I got curious and decided to finally do what no other bit of open-source code could do: encode VP6 to FLV without relying on any external software.
In addition to the FLV muxer I also implemented all known decoders as well and that was uneven load. One evening was enough to implement two and half codecs: FLV1 (it’s just H.263 with slightly different header and block format), Flash ADPCM (a slight variation of IMA ADPCM) and a bit of ASAO. Another day was spent on trying to make ASAO work properly (I dislike codecs with parametric bit allocation like this one, at least it’s not a typical speech codec). VP6 modifications took minutes, Flash Screen Video was done in less than an hour, Flash Screen Video 2 took the rest of a day (because I completely forgot how priming works there). I wasted another day on hacking barely enough support for onMetaData packet parsing and the other codec-specific bits in FLV demuxer.
And now it’s ready and more or less working. It can even play H.264+AAC combination (remember when it was popular), the only codecs it does not support are Speex (I’m not sure if I ever want to touch it) and MP3 (this one I’ll deal with eventually and FLV will provide me with nicely split MP3 packets for testing before the infrastructure for handling raw streams is ready).
Now what to do next? It would be nice to have SANM/SMUSH support, maybe get to MP3 already (so nihav-sndplay is even more usable for me) or RE all those VoxWare codecs (I hope I can find the samples). There’s some interest for bearly functioning VP7 encoder too.
But who cares about that? I can encode VP6 into FLV now (even if I have no reasons to do so).