LX. Ming functions for Flash
Warning
This extension is EXPERIMENTAL. The behaviour of this extension
-- including the names of its functions and anything else
documented about this extension -- may change without notice
in a future release of PHP. Use this extension at your own
risk.
Introduction
First of all: Ming is not an acronym. Ming is an open-source
(LGPL) library which allows you to create SWF ("Flash")
format movies. Ming supports almost all of Flash 4's features,
including: shapes, gradients, bitmaps (pngs and jpegs),
morphs ("shape tweens"), text, buttons, actions,
sprites ("movie clips"), streaming mp3, and color
transforms --the only thing that's missing is sound events.
Note that all values specifying length, distance, size,
etc. are in "twips", twenty units per pixel. That's
pretty much arbitrary, though, since the player scales the
movie to whatever pixel size is specified in the embed/object
tag, or the entire frame if not embedded.
Ming offers a number of advantages over the existing PHP/libswf
module. You can use Ming anywhere you can compile the code,
whereas libswf is closed-source and only available for a
few platforms, Windows not one of them. Ming provides some
insulation from the mundane details of the SWF file format,
wrapping the movie elements in PHP objects. Also, Ming is
still being maintained; if there's a feature that you want
to see, just let us know ming@opaque.net.
Ming was added in PHP 4.0.5.
Requirements
To use Ming with PHP, you first need to build and install
the Ming library. Source code and installation instructions
are available at the Ming home page: http://ming.sourceforge.net/
along with examples, a small tutorial, and the latest news.
Download the ming archive. Unpack the archive. Go in the
Ming directory. make. make install.
This will build libming.so and install it into /usr/lib/,
and copy ming.h into /usr/include/. Edit the PREFIX= line
in the Makefile to change the installation directory.
