Homebrew Flash Player on PSP

Got a PSP with version 1.0 or 1.5 of the PSP firmware? Now you can play you Flash files on it! This is not an official player from Adobe and it only supports a subset of the Flash 7 features, but this is indeed interesting.

For the PC, the player is ubiqous - everyone has it. Adobe has chosen a different model for distributing the Flash Player to devices. On phones, you will have to pay for the player yourself unless you have a very specific version of a Nokia phone and use a ISP that happens to like Flash and has cash to burn. The only exception to this is the Japanese market were quite many of the current phones support Flash in some way. For other devices, you'll have to wait for your device manufacturer to license with Macromedia or a geek with too much spare time to create the player for you. Last month, the news of an Open Source Flash Player 7 for Linux surfaced. Today, it's a Flash Player for the PSP that is being made without Adobe.
The first reports indicate that some, but not all the Flash 7 features are supported in this release, but expect this to change as enough hackers with PSP's get at it. Phil Torrone from MAKE magazine today published images and a short report.

The most interesting about this is not really that fact that it is possible, but rather that the community now has gained more speed than Adobe itself. Unless Adobe breaks away from the "pay us or don't play Flash"-policy, we could end up with a host of homemade Flash players that is buggy and has just partial file format support. These players won't spread too fast though, so for now this is just fun for geeks. In the longer term it could be both good and bad. It's good that more devices get Flash playback, but it's not so good that there's little or no quality control that can/will cause Flash movies to break. This again will reflect on the developers and then on Flash itself.
Visit MAKE Blog to read more and see images

 

 

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