Gnash Starts To Shine With Fourth Beta Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gnash Starts To Shine With Fourth Beta Release

Gnash, the Free Software Foundation project to create a completely open-source SWF movie player and browser plug-in that aims to be compatible with a majority of Adobe Flash files, has reached version 0.8.5, which is its fourth beta release. There's quite a bit of new work in Gnash 0.8.5 including MIT-SHM and X-Video support, NetConnection compatibility with more video sites, support for saving all streamed/loaded video files to disk, support for new codecs to maintain compatibility with YouTube videos, support for FLV parsing and decoding of H.264 video and AAC audio, a new GUI for KDE4 / Qt4 with SWF properties and Gnash preferences dialog boxes, support for Speex using libspeex, and improved remoting support. The mentioned changes were just what we had found interesting from the official Gnash 8.5 change-log...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzExNQ

[RealNC]

Looks great! This is out-featuring Adobe's version already (Xv and Qt/KDE, yay!)

[Melcar]

The sooner I can get rid of Adobe's player the better.

[etnlWings]

Hopefully with XV support, I'll now have a way of watching the new widescreen-formatted youtube vids without having to use youtube-dl due to the official flash plugin choking up on any vid posted in the last few months.

[deanjo]

Hopefully with XV support, I'll now have a way of watching the new widescreen-formatted youtube vids without having to use youtube-dl due to the official flash plugin choking up on any vid posted in the last few months.

Better yet, add vdpau support and blow by adobe.

[Louise]

Support for saving all streamed (FLV, H264, MP3 etc) and loaded
(JPEG, SWF, PNG, GIF) media to disk.

That is just the coolest feature ever!!! :D

[mirza]

This enables even cheaper netbooks with CPUs nobody ever heard of :-)

[Chewi]

I'm so sick of my laptop's fan having a fit every time any kind of Flash appears on a page. It's ridiculous. I'd love to ditch Adobe's plugin. I've tried Gnash a couple of times over the years but it didn't play much at the time. How well does it actually work now? Anyone tried it?

[fabioamd87]

my 64bit system say thanks

[etnlWings]

my 64bit system say thanks

There's something lacking in the recently released 64-bit flash plugin from Adobe?

Well, moreso than the 32-bit plugin from Adobe?

[fabioamd87]

adobe ufficially release a 64bit plugin?

[Ant P.]

I remember Gnash sucking horribly compared to swfdec about a year ago, but if this can play youtube without sucking up all my CPU and requiring me to type in "fmt=6" on every URL like that does, I'm sold.

[deanjo]

adobe ufficially release a 64bit plugin?
It's been out since December. Check out the adobe labs site.

[fabioamd87]

it's just a preview, and not stable.

[RealNC]

it's just a preview, and not stable.

It's more stable then older, non-64bit versions. Maybe not on Windows, but on Linux, it works much better (faster, less crashes and less glitches) than "stable" ones.

So I recommend you use it. I'm on 10.0.22.87 64-bit currently.

[fabioamd87]

I have video very slowed when in fullscreen.
using ati x1900gt with fglrx on archlinux 64bit

[remm]

I remember Gnash sucking horribly compared to swfdec about a year ago, but if this can play youtube without sucking up all my CPU and requiring me to type in "fmt=6" on every URL like that does, I'm sold.

I will test the new Gnash release shortly, but I wonder if swfdec is going anywhere (no dev activity for the past two months cannot be good).

[sreyan]

I will test the new Gnash release shortly, but I wonder if swfdec is going anywhere (no dev activity for the past two months cannot be good).


Otte, one of the devs for swfdec wants feedback and love. See http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2008/12/18/on-loneliness/

[logic]

I'd have to agree with RealNC; the beta 64-bit flash player is working a heck of a lot better for me (on Fedora) than that 32-bit nspluginwrapped abortion we used to be forced to use.

That being said, I'd be even happier to have an open source player that worked reliably.

[Vadi]

One of the reasons Adobe went with a 64bit for Linux was because of all the instability the 32bit one was giving. They explicitly say that on the downloads page, haha.

So having a crashy crashy solution made a good non-crashy one :)

[curaga]

Why would just a change to 64 bits reduce crashes?

Sure, there is more space = less likely to have buffer overflows, but any decent code should not have those.

[logic]

There wasn't a problem with the 32-bit version of Flash; run natively under a 32-bit browser, it works fine.

The problem is fundamentally one of running any 32-bit plugin under nspluginwrapper and a 64-bit browser. So, nspluginwrapper is the underlying problem, but flash is one of those few remaining plugins that required it, until they released a 64-bit native build.

[89c51]

does it work with vimeo and last.fm ???

[etymxris]

Does gnash handle z-ordering correctly yet?

[monraaf]

does it work with vimeo and last.fm ???

Nope. I tried it, a lot of flashcontent doesn't work with Gnash. Youtube works, but only in normal mode not HD mode, and even then it's more CPU intensive than the proprietary Adobe plugin.

I'm sorry to say, but it will probably take years before Gnash is on par with the proprietary Adobe plugin.

[remm]

Just tested 0.8.5, and it looks to it's now roughly equivalent to swfdec. Nice :)

[Mithrandir]

What happened to swfdec? There wasn't any commits to git repository at freedesktop.org since December. At least gnash improved to usable levels.

[nanonyme]

What happened to swfdec? There wasn't any commits to git repository at freedesktop.org since December. At least gnash improved to usable levels.
Just out of interest: why do we need two opensource Flash projects in the first place?

[Zhick]

Just out of interest: why do we need two opensource Flash projects in the first place?
"We" don't need two Flash projects.
It just appears there are two groups of developers who have different approaches and thus develop in different projects. It's their invested time/work, so that's fine. It's the developers decision.

[nanonyme]

"We" don't need two Flash projects.
It just appears there are two groups of developers who have different approaches and thus develop in different projects. It's their invested time/work, so that's fine. It's the developers decision.
I merely noted since I was puzzled by why it should matter if one open Flash project would start piling dust. The other one continues and that ought to be plenty enough. :)

[Rubicashrama]

wonderful chair up and nice post here

Thanks and nice to meet you




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[nanonyme]

There wasn't a problem with the 32-bit version of Flash; run natively under a 32-bit browser, it works fine.

The problem is fundamentally one of running any 32-bit plugin under nspluginwrapper and a 64-bit browser. So, nspluginwrapper is the underlying problem, but flash is one of those few remaining plugins that required it, until they released a 64-bit native build.Yeah, I - as probably quite a few others - sent Adobe a message prior to their announcement of wanting to make a 64-bit build in which I attempted to as diplomatically as possible explain the whole nspluginwrapper situation with 64bit Linuxes and why it's not ideal for Adobe (if nspluginwrapper has a bug, people complain about Adobe's Flash still and other such stuff which is bad for Adobe's brand; forgotten quite a bit of what I said). Maybe companies actually do listen and learn if they've given good enough reasons economic-wise? :3
(Or then they just fed up with the nagging)

[Kano]

The Flash plugin for 64 bit has the same codebase as the 32 bit version, just the opengl accelleration feature is missing (reports exactly the same version). Therefore it is a bit slow with hd content - even with nvidia or fglrx driver. Best performance you get with 32 bit with binary 3d driver and activated vsync for opengl.

[Wyatt]

The Flash plugin for 64 bit has the same codebase as the 32 bit version, just the opengl accelleration feature is missing (reports exactly the same version). Therefore it is a bit slow with hd content - even with nvidia or fglrx driver. Best performance you get with 32 bit with binary 3d driver and activated vsync for opengl.

Interesting, I wasn't actually aware of all of that. 'Course, even had I been when it came out, I still wouldn't have hesitated. You simply cannot beat orders of magnitude when it comes to improving browser stability. :)

[Kano]

browser crashes is something that i do not worry about anymore, just happens too ofter. There is a crash recover feature that works at least ;)

[Pfanne]

browser crashes is something that i do not worry about anymore, just happens too ofter. There is a crash recover feature that works at least ;)

having to reload you halfstreamed episode of whatever is kinda frustrating ;)

[Wyatt]

browser crashes is something that i do not worry about anymore, just happens too ofter. There is a crash recover feature that works at least ;)

Well the bigger problem is that the nspluginwrapped Flash tended to actually crash my sound entirely. I'm not sure on specifics, but I ended up reloading my sound module frequently.

And restoring 60+ tabs can be time-consuming. ;)

[Kano]

Nobody needs to use pluginwrapper, remove that. You can use java and flash natively for 64 bit. I don't get why you still talk about that outdated wrapper.

[Wyatt]

Nobody needs to use pluginwrapper, remove that. You can use java and flash natively for 64 bit. I don't get why you still talk about that outdated wrapper.

Huh? I believe we've had a miscommunication. I haven't used the wrapper since the day the 64-bit builds first went public. I was saying that, even had I known that the 64-bit builds don't have GPU acceleration, I wouldn't have hesitated to switch to them. The stability of both my browser and my sound drivers, while not perfect, really is hundreds of times better with the natively 64-bit Flash plugin. It did cause me many problems in the past, but not so many now.

[RealNC]

Nobody needs to use pluginwrapper, remove that. You can use java and flash natively for 64 bit. I don't get why you still talk about that outdated wrapper.

I still use the wrapper for the Acrobat Reader plugin :)