使用ffmpeg捆绑Flex AIR应用程序

Question

In my Flex AIR application, I use ffmpeg via the NativeProcess API .

When user installs my application, I would like him to install ffmpeg as well. Ideally, he would have it after installing my application without downloading ffmpeg from www.ffmpeg.org/ , installing and configuring it separately.

What is the best way to do it?

Answer 1

If my memory is correct, you can't bundle executables into the installer for security reasons. Well you can, but you can't execute them where they're extracted (mind you, that memory dates from before the introduction of NativeProcess).

The idea - I guess - is that the user can't download an AIR app that can potentially run malicious code without him knowing it. The user has to somehow explicitly allow this, for instance by downloading the file into a specific location.

To reduce the number of steps for the user, you could place a zip with a preconfigured version of ffmpeg on a server, and automatically download that on first run of the application. The user will then only have to pick a location to which the zip will be extracted.

If you don't have a web server, you can serve up the zip through some third-party service like Amazon S3, DropBox, Github, etc.

Answer 2

You can embed any file you want. You probably can not run an installer. But do ffmpeg need to be installed? If it is enough to copy all the files to a spécific location, you can perfectley embed those files in your application, and then run the executable via NativeProcess. In flash pro, you just have to specify à folder (or files) in the AIR parmeters 'included files' (guessed name as i have flash pro in french). I guess that's easy in flex to ... Those file are then stored in File.applicationDirectory