Archive for the “PEAR” Category

This article describes how you can use SWF files as widgets in BEML that have been protected by utilities that prevent decompilation. Before we start, just a couple of things I’d like to point out:

• This article is NOT a review of the effectiveness of SWF Protection tools, there are plenty of (endless) discussions on that topic on specialized forums.
• This approach is NOT my recommended one for creating User Generated Content upload widgets. I still believe using a secured mid-tier upload server is a better model. Event with a protected SWF, a proxy tool like Charles or WireShark will give a hacker all the information he needs to get your token if you do not protect your sensitive Widget/Server communications.

Why would you do this?

The short answer is that the SWF format is a pseudo-compiled, documented file format. This implies that it is relatively easy to reverse engineer a SWF file. Just Google “swf decompilers” and look at the results. There are literally dozens of tools that allow anyone to retrieve the complete source code of a SWF. Regarding BEML Widgets, this may pose some security threats if for example you want to:

• Create a video upload widget that uploads straight into your Brightcove account. Again, SWF protection by itself is NOT the approach I would recommend, as this requires including/sending a Write Token to use the Media API in your SWF.
• Create a widget that interfaces with your backend and that contains configuration information you want to give some level of protection
• Create a widget that represents a considerable investment or effort, and by consequence you want to protect from being duplicated

to name but a few.

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This customized player shows what I believe to be the simplest and most effective approach to a basic implementation of subtitling (or captioning) in normal and full screen mode.

Cue point definitions are not required, this example uses the video progression index and standard subtitling text formats. This means it’s really easy to use this with videos for which you have the subtitling text and time indexes available in a standard format like .srt.

The article also shows how to use a free subtitling tool to create subtitle files you can use with this approach.

The subtitling text size will automatically switch when in player or full screen mode.

And here’s how you do it…

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PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. The code in PEAR is partitioned in “packages”. Each package is a separate project with its own development team, version number, release cycle, documentation and a defined relation to other packages (including dependencies). Packages are distributed as gzipped tar files with a description file inside, and installed on your local system using the PEAR installer.PEAR contains PHP classes that are perfect for serializing data to be passed to a Flex application. Unfortunately, there is currently no package that would allow automatic installation for a Flex/PHP developer that wants to use the PEAR XML Serializer functionality.

In this article, I am going to describe how to do a local tweak and installation of the PEAR XML classes on a server that does not have PEAR pre-installed. Even if your server has PEAR installed, this approach will work. Read the rest of this entry »