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<h1 class="title">Introduction</h1>
<p class="para">
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.
</p>
<p class="para">
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.
</p>
<p class="para">
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 at <a href="http://www.libming.org/" class="link external">» http://www.libming.org/</a>.
</p>
<div class="warning"><strong class="warning">Warning</strong><p class="simpara">This extension is
<em class="emphasis">EXPERIMENTAL</em>. The behaviour of this extension including
the names of its functions and any other documentation surrounding this
extension may change without notice in a future release of PHP.
This extension should be used at your own risk.</p></div>
<blockquote class="note"><p><strong class="note">Note</strong>:
<p class="para">
This extension has been moved to the
<a href="http://pecl.php.net/" class="link external">» PECL</a> repository and is no longer bundled with
PHP as of PHP 5.3.0.
</p>
</p></blockquote>
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