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Interview With Linux Flash Player's Lead Engineer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the because-everyone-loves-flash dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "Ryan Stewart of ZDNet has an interview with Mike Melanson, the lead engineer behind Adobe's upcoming Flash Player 9 for Linux. It covers what the plans are for the player, what kinds of things won't be in the Linux player that are in the other players, and ways to give Adobe input on the Linux player."

3 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Re:no hard questions asked.... by damiangerous · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's not a comparable situation. The PDF format specifications are freely available for anyone to use. Not so with Flash. The specifications are available, sure, but the license to get them includes a provision about not creating a player. Therefore the only way Open Source players can exist is through reverse engineering. Some do exist though, like GNUFlash, but it's not an easy task.

  2. Open source player. by phoebe · · Score: 5, Informative
    It does not sound like he has heard of Gnash:

    Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player. Till now it has only been possible to play flash movies with proprietary software. While there are a few other free flash players, none supports anything higher than SWF v4 at best. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports many SWF v7 features.

    Features

    1. Runs standalone: Gnash can run standalone to play flash movies.
    2. Firefox plugin: Gnash can also run as a plugin from within Firefox.
    3. SWF v7 compliant: Gnash can play many current flash movies.
    4. XML Message server: Gnash also supports an XML based message system as is documented in the Flash Format specification.
    5. High Quality Output: Gnash uses OpenGL for rendering the graphics.
    6. Free Software: Gnash is 100% free software.
  3. Re:Allow me to rain on this parade... by Sancho · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can get in-sync audio by using alsa-oss. I'm sure if you Google around, you'll find the solution to your problem.

    The out-of-sync sound on Linux annoyed me to no end until I installed Ubuntu on a notebook to see what all the fuss was about. I was having problems getting Flash sound to play /at/all/ and hit the forums--sure enough, there was a solution to that /and/ the sync issue. I was ecstatic!