This is from the blog entry I found on Macromedia's blogger site here.
Viewing Flash on PSP
Viewing Flash on PSP: My weblog is read by lots of
Flash developers, but this entry is written particularly for people
trying to view WWW sites with Adobe Flash content on Sony PSP devices.
The new v2.70 firmware upgrade includes
an Adobe Flash Player specially tailored for this gaming console. But
many of the sites on the World Wide Web use Flash files which were
developed and tested for fullsized computers, and so not every website
will play the same on both big box and little box. In the extended
entry here I'm starting up a little FAQ for viewing
Flash websites on the Sony PSP. I hope the content developers who
regularly read this blog can help add to the tips, and with luck we'll
be able to get a final FAQ in a better location for the PSP-owning
public before too long. Let's go...!
It's great that Sony is now distributing an Adobe Flash Player in
their firmware upgrade to their entire audience... developers will now
have a predictable capability to test against for this device.
But most of the people using a PSP will likely go out to
various sites on the World Wide Web, and see files that do not play as
well as they do on the desktop computer. There are reasons for this, let's list some of them here:
- There's about 1.5 megabytes of RAM available for viewing content on
this device. WWW pages with Flash content are tested on computers which
have much more memory than the PSP. It's very easy to have made
Flash/HTML files which exceeds the memory capabilities of the new
device.
- Flash files have an optimized download size, but
expand in memory when played. This is precisely the opposite from the
way video is handled. Flash uses sprites, little graphical
symbols which are defined once and used repeatedly, changing position,
size, compositing mode and more. A video has large total download
costs, but once a frame is viewed it can be purged from memory and the
next scene loaded. Flash has very small download costs, but we need to
keep this entire symbol dictionary in memory throughout playback.
Result: download size is less related to actual application memory in
Flash than for video, so playability on PSP will vary significantly
with the particular content being viewed.
- Some Flash files overwhelm the processor. Although the
Sony PSP has a respectable processor clock, research in the field
indicates that this is often throttled down for battery life. If a
Flash site requests a very high framerate, or uses complex logic loops,
then this may strain the device.
- The Adobe Flash Player distributed by Sony is based on
a version 6.0 Player. This was released for computers back towards
2002, and most consumers
have installed the version 7.0 and 8.0 Players since then. This means
that websites have confidently moved into offering newer files, with
more features available. I don't know a way to research this offhand,
but I suspect that many, many websites currently offer Flash files
which are not playable within a 6.0 generation Player.
- There's one more website wrinkle: Lots of sites try to
auto-detect their visitors' capabilities and offer helpful advice on
what to upgrade, or present alternate content to older machines. The
sites you visit may behave differently if you visit in a browser which
the site's authors did not anticipate.
- The Sony announcement mentions that "not all Flash 6.0
features are supported", but in practice I don't think this will be
much of an issue... if you check the early documentation
you'll see that most of these are browser capabilities, like printing
or LiveConnect or different device codecs. These missing features are
used in *some* WWW Flash-enhanced sites, but the basic core rendering
engine does seem to have good support in the PSP environment.
That's the bad news -- visiting random websites may not render Flash
content well. But on the good side we've now got a predictable
rendering engine in universal deployment on the Sony PSP, so starting
now we'll be able to develop content deliberately optimized for this
new device.
(Compare what's already done in the mobile world, with the Adobe
Flash Lite rendering engine... the key difference between Mobile Flash
and PSP Flash is that the former has content optimized for mobile
hardware, while the Sony PSP is trying to view WWW sites which were
optimized for full-sized computers.)
FAQ (in the "Favorite Anticipated Questions"
deacronymization, because it's hard for me to guess the most frequent
questions today.... ;-)
(Q) I heard some other people made a Flash player, maybe that will work better?
(A) Speaking personally, I'm seeing a lot more companies advertising
"Flash support", but this usually means that they can import a SWF file
and render some parts of it. Sometimes these claims are grandiose;
rarely is there any technical info to back it up. In this case, Sony
has deployed an actual Adobe Flash Player to their entire customer
base, so the issue of alternative renderers is moot.
(Q) Will Adobe be improving the Flash Player on Sony PSP?
(A) I don't know, but I sure hope so... one of the
major goals right now is for Adobe to provide predictable media and
interactivity capabilities across the range of the world's devices...
to not interfere with each device's basic nature but to provide a media
layer that designers and developers can rely upon to render their work.
Adobe works with Sony in many areas, and I'd like to see further work
continue myself. Haven't seen any public announcements yet, though.
(Q) What can I do if a favorite site won't play?
(A) I'm not sure on this one yet... there is talk on
PSP sites about ways to play content out of the browser, but I can't
evaluate this conversation yet. I'd like to beef up this section of the
FAQ; any tips?
(Q) The PSP has some games which play great, so why is this one Flash game so sucky?
(A) You're right, the PSP is capable of very high
performance. But the best games are designed and tested for that
device, take advantage of its strengths, minimize its weaknesses. Most
Flash content we see right now has been designed for a totally
different class of machine, so some examples will likely look really
bad on a different device. But now that we've got the Flash Player
engine on the PSP we can test against this device during development...
there's a lot of really creative Flash professionals out there, and now they've got the keys to the highway. Future's looking good.
Some general references (and my apologies in advance for not crediting these links!):
ExtremeTech's PSP Media Guide March 2005. Primer on memory sticks, handling digital photographs, MPEG-4, etc.
Geek.com explains how the CPU speed in the PSP is throttled down for better battery life.
Web Design for Sony PSP, Oct 05, focuses on getting WWW content to render better in this browser.
Sony PSP Web Design Primer, Jan 06, offers a readable introduction to the display capabilities of the device.
Developing Web Sites and Applications for Sony PSP has some technical details I haven't seen elsewhere.
PSPUpdates
links to a technique for playing Flash files outside of the browser. I
have not investigated this, and do not yet have any useful context of
my own to offer.
---
Author, Hacking the PSP
www.hackingpsp.com
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