16 bit tiff decoder for flex

I am trying to open a 16 bit tiff ima开发者_StackOverflow社区ge in my AIR app. What I have found is a baseline decoder which supports only 8 bit images. Here are my options:

• Extend its functionality to open 16 bit images but I don't know how to do that and how trivial it is.

  Open my images as 8 bit but I need to do that automatically within Flex. Don't know how to do that either.

• I also need to support lzw compression for tiff, so please refer me some resources so I can develop that in case it doesn't exist already.

Flash Player, and therefore Flex, are limited in the supported image formats. I thought it was just gif, jpg, and png actually.

To deal with other formats, I would suggest checking out this project which made use of Alchemy to convert C code into an ActionScript SWC. tif files are listed as supported and I assume that 'tif' and 'tiff' are the same.