Free Culture Presentation Using SWFTools (Still Experimental)

Introduction

Here you have Lawrence Lessig’s classic Free Culture presentation given at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference on July 24, 2002. Contents are the same in both presentations (the original and this one). Both the audio file and movies have been extracted from the original presentation. (The original presentation can be found at http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/.)

Flash presentation

• Single click puts presentation in full-screen mode (if supported) and starts downloading the presentation.

• Double click or space starts/stops sound.

• Key f enables/disables full screen (again, if supported).

• Left/PageUp goes to previous slide.

• Right/PageDown goes to next slide.

• Up goes to first slide (and starts again).

• Down goes to last slide.

Embedding code

Just in case you might want to embed this presentation. Depending on how your hosting facility treats HTML tags and Flash embedding, it might work (or not :-().

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.archive.org/download/Lessig-Free_Culture/lessig-freeculture-loader.swf" width="400" height="300"><param name="movie" value="http://www.archive.org/download/Lessig-Free_Culture/lessig-freeculture-loader.swf"><param name="play" value="true"><param name="loop" value="false"><param name="quality" value="high"><param name="loop" value="false"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"></object>

Features

• It is entirely build using free software (SWFTools, which are released under the GNU GPLv2).

• Thanks to a more efficient audio compression provided by SWFTools, the output file is smaller (6.5MB instead of 8.4MB).

• It has full screen capabilities, if your Flash player supports it (requires Flash player 9,0,28,0 as explained in this article).

• It has a working loader with a counter.

Known bugs and desired features

• Audio embedding in ActionScript seems to be extremely tricky (at least for me).

  This may be well the reason why the loader at the Internet Archive doesn’t work fine.

  My guess (but remember that I’m not a Flash expert) is that Flowplayer seems to have problems with event sounds instead of sounds streams.

License

As the original file itself, the Flash presentation is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Spain license.

This requires also that any derivate works from this presentation must be licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Disclaimer

This file is provided “as is”. I hope others might find the contents of the presentation interesting.

But consider that I’m not a programmer. This means that I cannot code many features that I have in mind.

It doesn’t matter how deeply I might regret this fact, I cannot write obvious code for skilled programmers (not even for coding newbies). And I have to learn in order to achieve the most basic functionalities.

Acknowledgments

I wouldn't have been able to provide this presentation without the helping hands of the following individuals and I would like to thank them:

Sergio Costas

for his excellent SuperShow program and his help with the original script.

Matthias Kramm

for his excellent work with SWFTools, his constant improvements to the code, his readiness to fix bugs, and his openess to suggestions for future improvements.

Chris Pugh

for his willingness to help with the ActionScript code and swfc code as well.

Huub Schaeks

for his help explaining the most basic ActionScript questions and for the partial font embedding improvements in SWFTools.