Slashdot Mirror
Flash 9 Beta for Linux Available
DemiKnute writes "According to the official Penguin.SWF blog, the a beta release of the long-awaited Flash 9 for Linux is available for download, a mere year after the release for Windows." From the blog:
"While we are still working out exactly how to distribute the final Player version to be as easy as possible for the typical end user, this beta includes 2 gzip'd tarball packages: one is for the Mozilla plugin and the other is for a GTK-based Standalone Flash Player. Either will need to be downloaded manually via the Adobe Labs website and unpacked. The standalone Player (gflashplayer) can be run in place (after you set its executable permission). The plugin is dropped into your local plugin directory (for a local user) or the system-wide plugin directory."
Report bugs here.
Will there be a 64 bit version for us AMD64 users?
I can't play flash animations on my Turion laptop with Debian AMD64 installed.
here and here.
]] The plugin is dropped into your local plugin directory (for a local user) or the system-wide plugin directory.
Until you do a yum upgrade, or something like that. Because then you get a separate directory for each sub version of firefox with a different plugins directory underneath it, and you lose your plugin once again, until you symlink to the plugin from the new plugins directory. Yes, maintaining software on Linux is a breeze, sometimes.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Even being beta version, Flash 9 for GNU/Linux works very well when compared to previous player.
Some flash movies that hogged Firefox UI with old player work flawlessy now. Audio is now in sync with video.
While not perfect, this release makes me wonder when the free software Gnash player reaches a usable state. Being a free software enthuasist, i generally don't like the idea of using a proprietary plugin, but being also pragmatic, i use it. I also think that the official Flash plugin could be faster and more bug-free, if the source code were available and under a GPL compatible licence.
That being said, i still think it's important that GNU/Linux users, especially Average Joe, have a lot less hassle with badly designed, flash-dependent websites.
Who is John Galt?
Now we too can participate in the revenue generating flash supported articles that are linked from slashdot!!!! They're not just for the windows crowd anymore!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
I'm not a zealot by any means when it comes to free software. I just want to use Linux and I also want to watch stuff on YouTube or browse around Dane Cook's site or whatever. Flash isn't my favorite program in the world, but not all of us are "TEH OMGZZZ FLASH SUXORZ AND IT SHOULD DIE!111!!!1111!" Some people like to use their computers for more reasons than to simply make a statement or a point. On that note, done some limited testing and it works very well. Woohoo!
Oh joy, I suppose the Solaris version will come only one year after Linux. Hang on folks, we're almost there!
...a mere year after the release for Windows
Want some cheese with that whine?
So I installed it, it did work without any problems, watched some movies at youtube.com and saw some flash-ads here and there.. But now what? Give me some good sites where flash really shows what it's good for!
I am trying it (inside Firefox and Mozilla as well) and it works perfectly. Two comments. (1) with Flash 7, audio was skippy (I have a cheapo onboard audio card; with Flash 9, I can finally enjoy youtube and the like. (2) today /. was linking to a article linking to
http://www.bush-of-ghosts.com/ ; with Flash 7, it showed blank ; with Flash 9 , it works.
was checked that FlashBlock still worked.
I'm not joking. I was more concerned about that than the sound being in sync. Does anyone think I'm weird?
Summation 2
There are a few problems with this release that I hope will be fixed in the future (I can only hope, since it's not open source yet).
The plugin will search for libssl.so and libasound.so; that's broken. They should dlopen the actual library or build it statically, but a hack like that is certainly going to cause problems. (btw, in Ubuntu/Debian you need the libssl-dev and libasound2-dev packages to use all the features of this plugin).
The most annoying bugs I had with Flash (believe it or not) are still there. If the mouse is hovering a Flash content inside a browser window, the browser won't recognize keyboard or even mouse events. This is annoying when you're scrolling through a page with Flash ads or when you want to Ctrl+L but the damn mouse is in the wrong place.
The other problem is that Flash ads that have the "point your mouse here to see the full ad" will always display the "full ad", and you have to choose between the Flash Block extension and not reading that damn page at all.
Hope this clears up the sound syncing issues with YouTube and Linux
I myself use it because I'm comfortable with programming in a UNIX environment and prefer using Open Source tools in both Linux and Windows - but I don't feel "dirty" editing a Word document in MS Office - if anything, because I know Office well enough by now, I get the job done quicker to have more "playtime" in Linux!
However, with that said, I don't understand why an application that just allows you to view files (rather than create or edit them) ever needs to be closed source anyway - if you're a car manufacturer you won't make a car that is only confortable for people who are 5'6" tall to drive, you'll make it with adjustable seats so it caters to the widest possible audience possible. I don't understand why MS, Adobe and others are so protective of viewing their file formats anyway when you still have to go buy their applications to create or change those file formats.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Did they fix the mouse scroll bug in the flash plugin? (where the mouse scroll doesn't work over any embedded flash).
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
Hearing flash sound on Kubuntu Linux is still a hit and miss, miss, miss game...
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Now I can enjoy all that forbidden Weebl & Bob Pie without the wine. I don't have to be drunk & dirty anymore.
The old flash player had some horrible issues with sound output that actually made firefox suck.
This has been a problem at Ubuntu and I guess others.
I work with a web-based application and usually watching any YouTube video would crash my entire browser session.
Ask and you shall receive. Warning, they are a LOT more addictive that they seem. :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
A few Linux users refusing to use flash is going to make fk all difference to Adobe.
Flash is here to stay for now, it's too well entrenched.
And all the complaints about Flash mainly boil down to one thing, it's a standard but closed source, which leads to exactly the kind of thing people have had to put up with of not being able to use a lot of websites because they require 8 or above and Adobe hadn't released a player...
If you're using Firefox, you'll want this extension to make the obnoxious flash-based ads a voluntary thing.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
I'm hoping Flashblock still works with it
if you want it system wide, then make a standalone executable that only needs to be double clicked in Konqueror or Nautilus (or whaever else takes your fancy) and have the installer quiz you for the options and password
It ISN'T EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE now is it... durr...
Let the distros worry about packaging issues (deb, rpm, tar.gz...) then they can tailor it for themselves from the tar.gz or however you pack up the binary (I'm guessing it's gonna be closed source)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
A little strange: I just unmasked and emerged the Firefox 9 beta, and it works great on Firefox but only kinda sorta works with Opera. Opera has detected the new plugin just fine (right clicking on a flash movie on YouTube brings up an "About Adobe Flash Player 9" option) but most YouTube movies stall out when I try to play them under Opera. The player UI loads, but the movie never plays. If I go to hardocp.com or other sites which make heavy use of flash ads, some show up but not others. In the past, all Mozilla plugins have worked flawlessly with Opera, but I think this Flash beta might be a little questionable. Does anybody else have the same problem?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well people don't have to buy software from Adobe to create flash files. The SWF format is open and there are lots of applications that can create SWF files. OpenOffice has an export to flash option, php has the MING library for generating dynamic files, and there's lots of 3rd party programs, like swish, that are sort of "flash lite." Then if you start looking around on the osflash site (osflash.org, I think) you'll find lots more open source flash stuff including compilers, IDEs, and lots of debugging tools.
I think the main reason companies are protective of the file reader programs is that they want to maintain the integrity of the format. They don't want someone coming out with a buggy or insecure player that makes people hate the format. Of course when they put out a buggy player then there's not much point.
http://www.supremecommander.com/
Although I believe much of the content is available at http://www.supremecommanderhq.com/ and maybe http://www.supcomuniverse.com/
Working on an OpenLaszlo http://www.openlaszlo.org/ project, which occasionally caused the flash player to timeout while testing. Its nice that i can now "continue running the script" instead of being forced to close out, fix one problem, come back in only to find another problem. Flash 7 on fedora didn't allow me to continue. Unfortunately flash 9 doesn't feel any faster in the application than flash 7 did.
Note all the people installing both flash and flash block! First they contract the disease and then they grab something to make it bearable. That says as much as the oblig technical derision.
BTW: there's a youtube downloader listed on freshmeat so you don't actually need to taint your OS with flash in order to watch the funnies on youtube.
Long-awaited, indeed. The best part is finally being able to play Flash Video 8 on Linux. They got a huge quality improvement when they switched from Sorensen Spark to ON2 VP6, but no one who cares about Linux users could use it... until now :)
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Great! Thanks a lot! Now, I'm hooked. How am I supposed to get any work done? Umm... gotta go.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Flash Player 9 for Windows was officially released on June 28, 2006.
4 months != 1 year
I use x86 primarily and this still annoys me. I strongly recommend that people start hacking on gnash.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
I had no issues at first. I gleefully went to a site that required Flash >7 (blackberrypearl.com) and it loaded fine. I right-clicked and saw that the player version in the context menu was 9, which was gratifying. But it otherwise seemed exactly the same.
After I closed that tab I was unable to load any pages in the others. Pressing Enter from the address bar did not cause the contents of the address bar to materialize. In fact nothing happened, not even an error message. I restarted the browser (Windows 98 mentality kicking in here), and that fixed it. But on a subsequent attempt I noticed the same thing again. This time I was able to load Slashdot once, but the CSS was missing. It was the plain white un-positioned fallback version of the site, which was actually interesting to see. It was as if I were using Netscape 3 or something.
Anyone else seeing these things? (I also have no audio, but I suspect I need to review the system requirements to mend that.)
As it has been slashdot, here are direct links to the files
i nuxplugin
l inux
http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_l
http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_standalone_
www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/ - much more than just badgers. The On the Moon series are my personal favourites at the mo, and with Flash Player 9 I can now see all the ones I've been missing that require >8.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Unfortunately a plain element pointing at a movie does not work.
If the movie is MPEG1 then it looks like crap.
If it is in a Microsoft format, people who aren't on Windows can't view it.
If it is in a Real Player or Quicktime format, people who aren't on Windows or the Mac OS can't view it.
Additionally, Real and Quicktime require your users to go to the effort of finding and installing the appropriate player software. Most can't be bothered.
Also, all the above formats are patent-encumbered.
If you choose a free format such as Ogg Vorbis+Theora, then again you force the user to waste their time hunting for the plugin software, but in addition there are about five hundred sites that all distribute slightly different versions; the correct (blessed?) site is impossible to find unless the user is a computer expert.
Flash looks attractive because of these problems. In addition it makes it impossible for non-experts to keep a copy of the movie, which makes it attractive to content publishers. In their eyes, the fact that those who don't use 32 bit Windows, the 32 bit Mac OS, or i386 GNU/Linux, can't view the content is but a small price to pay.
On another note: anyone read the EULA for this Flash player? It's pretty scary! Adobe could arbitrarily send you a huge bill for auditing your compliance at any time. In addition you are 'not allowed' to run the player on an embedded/set-top-box device. Does my desktop PC become embedded when I hook, it up to my TV?
Would have been great to have this when I was trying to buy tickets.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
It seems like that has died. That is too bad. It would be nice if it did not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
you can read more here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/emmy/archives/2006/
I have skimmed a few of the comments here and some of the anti-Flash-in-general comments that popped up in the "Holy shit, IE7 launched today!" story comments. I wanted to throw in a few observations about Flash and why keeping this medium around is important.
;-)
/. about how annoying Flash ads are, then allocate 3 of those 5 minutes to downloading and installing a Firefox extension (there are several, I believe -- Flashgot, right?) that blocks all Flash (including adverts) until you want them. I know they're annoying -- but coming from a media company that relies on advertisers buying those "fancy, irritating" Flash ads, I accept them as a necessary evil. A website running those box or vert ads aren't FORCING you to watch them now, 'cause I've taken 1 minute of my 5 minutes in this rant to tell you how to block 'em and get on with your web browsing life.
First, I will agree with anyone that says that Flash gets misused more often than not. It does. It sucks ass when someone does a really crap Flash project. I have 2-3 designers doing the visual labor with me turning their designs into relatively interesting Flash interactives. I like to think that I am using Flash properly, but I know I have much to learn, and I look forward to that opportunity keeping me gainfully employed for a few more years (until enough anti-Flash people get it killed?).
Secondly, if you're going to take 5 minutes to compose a rant on
Finally, I noticed folks talking about the tag to embed Flash. Stop. Stop doing that and google "swfObject" -- it's a Javascript library you can drop into a central location on your web server and forever forget about detecting Flash or making sure it's relatively standards compliant. The guy who wrote it put together a BETTER detection setup than Adobe did (their kit was NUTS), and it works really well. AND it's flexible, processing querystrings and adding flashvars very easily for a simple Flash embed. If you're still talking about the tag and Flash, you're either developing Flash badly (and this is coming from an intermediate level user who tricked people into paying him for it) or browsing a badly developed Flash site.
My 2-3 cents (5 minutes) about Flash. Be nice to it. With Flash video, it's really coming around as a useful tool, and things like Flex 2.0 (wicked cool way to build application interfaces) are making it more of a tool than a design medium for the web.
BTW -- if the title was confusing -- I was "dragged" into Flash development when folks found out I was better at writing ActionScript and using Flash than writing pure CSS page layout. I'm actually enjoying it -- if you're intersted in learning it, be prepared to re-learn a lot of stuff every 1.25 years or so with new Flash versions.
Thanks,
IronChefMorimoto
There is a lot of C code out there that makes incorrect assumptions about sizeof(pointer) and sizeof(int). In the AMD64 world, the two are not equal.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
It's free as in freedom. no it doesn't work perfectly yet, but Flash sites suck anyway
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Grandmother will click the update button in Synaptic when the distros include it. Grandmother won't be running a beta.
Were you born a snarky bastard or did you have to work at it?
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
John
I actually wouldn't mind an older Flash version, if it meant I didn't have to constantly be closing 64-bit Firefox and opening a 32-bit one.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't enjoy admitting it, but Flash *is* the only way to put movies on your web site so that the vast majority of the computing population is able to see them.
FINALLY!!! I'm a web developer, and I cant tell you how long this has been driving me nuts.
well, we did slashdot adobe's download page, I guess that means there are at least a significant amount of people using linux on the desktop.
I also kept hearing linux on the desktop wasn't ready.how come then all these people want to download a linux 100% desktop related plugin.
If we slashdot a download page for a linux desktop app from a non marginal company like adobe, it means more people then they'd like to (have others) believe ARE running linux on the desktop I'd say.
I'd like to see download numbers for a beta just to have an idea how much...anyone know ?
So make it mpeg2 or mpeg4. Duh. By the way: Flash also looks like crap, but it also performs like crap, and makes things difficult (and crappy-looking and performing) to try to view the video fullscreen.
I can view any WMV format on my Linux, it's just a question of whether or not I need the DLL. I only need the DLL for WMV9. OS X users have a nifty program called Flip4Mac, but ffmpeg has had support for older WMV formats for a long time.
Real Player sucks, always, of coures. But Quicktime has been well supported by various opensource libraries for as long as I can remember trying, so it works just fine on Linux. Bonus for OS X users -- they already have QuickTime.
This is just annoying as hell, because the same thing would be true for Flash if Microsoft hadn't included it recently. But seriously, if YouTube was all simple AVIs or MOVs encoded in h.264? Everyone would be rushing to download VLC, QuickTime, and the like.
In any case, you could always do what people have always done: Host two versions of the file, one Windows Media, one QuickTime. That way, everyone on a "user friendly" OS has a player installed by default that can handle it. And you can always use mpeg anyway.
I believe you can find free software to create files readable as most, if not all, of the above formats.
And what, pray tell, is the point of that? Anyone can save the SWF and upload it to another site, even if it still says "YouTube" on it. As for restricting piracy to experts only, we know how well that's worked in the past -- that's why only experts pirate movies -- oh wait.
I can always view the content, and it's always a pain in the ass. Even if I was exclusively 32-bit Windows, I'd prefer a format that I can save a copy of, play fullscreen, etc. And of course, there's this:
There are so many formats that don't come with EULAs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't like most flash sites because :
1) One huge swf is the site. This is the worst design, not only I have to download the hole thing but it don't allow me to go back the usual way (back in the browser does not work). This also implies that I am not allowed to bookmark a part in the middle of the site or send it to a friend.
2) Sound without previous approval, sound should be always optional and user activate, no site should ever make a noise just by entering it. It is unexpected and many people don't like, not counting when you're in a environment that do allow noises like a library or in the work.
3) No selection, to read large texts I usually use the selection as a tool to mark where I am, text that cannot be selected is a text with a "do not read" tag for me. I agree that this is a more personal opinion, but not being able to select will not help in the "people should not copy my text" avenue. People who do want to copy your text will be able to do it, in the worst case scenario all you need to do is to use a OCR with a screenshot.
4) The abuse of moving things is not a good thing. Movement, only because you can is annoying and should be avoided. Off course that if you're showcasing your animation work people expect it to move. But even so the site can gain from movement just when the user selects something to watch.
None of those are problems with flash it self, some AJAX sites do fall in the same mistakes so you can see that this has nothing to do with the closed sourceness quality of the flash player.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I doubt it. The sort of person who'll use the latest version of Flash indiscriminately almost certainly wouldn't have waited for a Linux version. All this means is that you now have the option of viewing the sites designed by such asshats.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Firefox on Windows finds and installs Quicktime just like it does for Flash. OSX I'm pretty sure comes w/ Quicktime, and installing Quicktime codecs, Realplayer, and Flash are all pretty simular on Linux.
I didn't say it was good
Flash didn't use ALSA until today's beta.
Legal or not, most Linux users have them because they're easy enough to install. And I'm pretty sure there are some legal ways to put it on Linux, since Linspire and Mepis both come with them.
Until now, Linux users couldn't use the latest versions of Flash, and the old version has audio/video sync issues that are just too annoying for many people to bother watching. It's too early to see what issues Flash 9 is going to have, and many Linux users probably won't even have it until it goes in their distro's repository and/or it gets out of beta or whatever. If I was going to put a video on my website for people with different OSs to see, the last format I'd use is Flash.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
The flash "virtual machine" is a ecmascript implementation. And spidermonkey works just fine on 64-bit so I'm not sure what their problem is.
Oh, maybe the rest of their codebase isn't 64-bit clean, like the rendering code.
Well big fucking surprise. Welcome to 21st century, Adobe. Now why don't you update your compositing routines to use more modern instruction sets (this goes for Photoshop et al. as well). Thanks.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
>> If the movie is MPEG1 then it looks like crap.
> So make it mpeg2 or mpeg4. Duh. By the way: Flash also looks like crap, but it also performs like crap, and makes things difficult (and crappy-looking and performing) to try to view the video fullscreen.
Flash movies don't look great, but they look at lot better than MPEG1. MPEG2 and MPEG4 are not usable for the reasons I mentioned before: users can't/won't download the software to play them; and software patents prevent free software implementation of players from being usable.
>> If it is in a Microsoft format, people who aren't on Windows can't view it.
> I can view any WMV format on my Linux, it's just a question of whether or not I need the DLL. I only need the DLL for WMV9. OS X users have a nifty program called Flip4Mac, but ffmpeg has had support for older WMV formats for a long time.
So can I, but only because I use i386. This solution is useless for everyone else. If you are going to restrict your viewers to i386 users, then you may as well make it easy for them to view the video and use Flash.
ffmpeg is nice in theory but it is not glitch-free. The version I have can't play VC-1 at all (last time I tried). But the big problem is that these formats are all patent-encumbered. No one can distribute the software in a usable form without opening themselves up to huge liability.
>> Additionally, Real and Quicktime require your users to go to the effort of finding and installing the appropriate player software. Most can't be bothered.
> This is just annoying as hell, because the same thing would be true for Flash if Microsoft hadn't included it recently.
So in summary, it is not annoying at all for Windows users; I can't speak for Mac users, but anyone who uses Firefox(tm) will get the plugin downloaded for them automatically.
> But seriously, if YouTube was all simple AVIs or MOVs encoded in h.264? Everyone would be rushing to download VLC, QuickTime, and the like.
No. If YouTube was all simple AVIs and MOVs then no one would use it. It is only because Flash makes it so easy to view content that such sites became popular in the first place.
> In any case, you could always do what people have always done: Host two versions of the file, one Windows Media, one QuickTime. That way, everyone on a "user friendly" OS has a player installed by default that can handle it. And you can always use mpeg anyway.
If only! Now you have the correct solution. Unfortunately, extra efford = extra expense, and no PHB will see the additional expense as justified given the incredibly small fraction of the market that we represent.
>> Also, all the above formats are patent-encumbered.
> I believe you can find free software to create files readable as most, if not all, of the above formats.
It is impossible for such free software to exist in countries with software patent laws.
>> In addition it makes it impossible for non-experts to keep a copy of the movie, which makes it attractive to content publishers.
> And what, pray tell, is the point of that? Anyone can save the SWF and upload it to another site, even if it still says "YouTube" on it. As for restricting piracy to experts only, we know how well that's worked in the past -- that's why only experts pirate movies -- oh wait.
You are missing my point. The fact is that content producers see this as a feature of Flash, not a defect!
I certainly haven't been waiting for Flash 9.
...and they don't get into the links section of my website, either.
Sites that use Flash un-necessarily are nothing but a pain in the arse, so I just don't visit them unless they have proper HTML alternatives.
http://download.macromedia.com.nyud.net:8090/pub/l abs/flashplayer9_update/FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar .gz
about me A - B
SO many Kid related sites with flash games don't work so well with Linux. I have 3 kids and they want to play at Club Penguin (nothing to do with Linux strangely enough)...I got it to work by installing flash and alll kinds of different fonts until I got everything right. Lots of "shockwave" stuff still won't work and I don't care to spend much time trying fix that. It's easier to just keep a windows partition around for sites like that. The real problem is the website developers of course not using web standards to do stuff with. Most of the slick Site design tools are made by companies with a vested iterest in promoting thier own proprietary stuff.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
firefox seems to consistently hang on the engadget site. I think it is related to the flash ads.
Anyone else see this?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
What and limit my potential memory-leak growth to 4 GB? You might prefer to stay in the stone age, but my firefox extensions will be able to leak 16 exabytes :)
As good as I think it is to see Linux get a native flash player it still bums me out to see that they have forgotten the BSDs again. Come one, they have players for Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and yet can't get a player compiled for FreeBSD.
Please go to Adobe Feature Request and request a native FreeBSD flash player. The community would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
-Link
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
Previous revisions of Flash Player for Linux preformed very poorly compared to the win32 versions (even the win32 verison in crossover office did a better job).
I think that it has something to do with the win32 version using SSE instructions and Linux version did not.
Flash still does not take advantage of the GPUs available for the last 10 years! Anyone trying to use Flash for more than a postage stamp size output feels this pain. The evolution from something designed to make small animated buttons and advertising is evident.
Poor performance and the new licensing may mean limited uptake for embedded applications.
there's no replacement for displacement
I find it far more effective to use NoScript. Quoting from their site: While its primary aim is preventing malicious JavaScript from running, NoScript can effectively block Java(TM), Flash® and other plugins on untrusted sites.
.. now I can finally use Digg Swarm/Stack .. yay!
However, ignoring all that. Flash 9
BOO
Flashblock is NOT a Flash client-it blocks the Flash client from rendering the SWF component in a page. Why would Adobe make a feature to block Flash from excecuting? They haven't. It IS Javascript, and it's pretty good, if you only want to see some Flash content and not everything all the time.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
The much larger address space allows for more leeway in memory management, even if you don't have over 4G.
For instance, nptl threads get a performance boost from not having to juggle around to save on stack space.
There are also advantages with prelinking.
Finally, even if you have "just" 4G in 32 bit, you won't be able to use all of it in one process, as the kernel needs some address space too.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Abuse of flash.
Flash like java applets should only be used when necessary.
What I hate is Flash for navigation.
Flash is only evil when abused.
Which is WAY TO OFTEN.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Heck, you could write one from scratch. It's never hard. AMD64 makes it trivial though, because porting over 32-bit code is really easy.
(speaking from experience, so Adobe is just lazy)
For the first time, the Linux Flash player is coming out before the next IDE, Flash 9 is. Flash 7 came out nearly 18 months after the IDE did on the last release...
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
it's Sum(32 .. 63, 2^n).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
YES! finally. I hated that with the old version I had, it was a resource hog, and the audio was slightly off-sync with the video. Also, at least on my machine, the previous version had problems grabbing the audio device. i.e. I would play a video (with mplayer), and then a swf file via the browser plugin. There would be no audio. I would have to kill Firefox in order for it to have sound for swf files again.
I have a collection of swf and mpg files that my daughter likes to watch, and the swf files were honestly a real pain because of this. I just installed the new version, and it appears flawless.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I know mpeg4 is supported by QuickTime. I believe it's also supported by recent versions of Windows Media Player, and I'm sure mpeg2 would be.
I believe mencoder can create mpeg2 streams.
YouTube is itself a hell of a lot of extra effort. So is Google Video. All that's needed is a script to encode to both WMV and QuickTime, or whatever two formats you pick. Or just one, if you only need Windows users to have the convenience.
Probably most people, true. I use amd64, and I hate having to switch to a 32-bit browser so Flash will work, but Java won't, and fonts look like crap. (Even if Java is incredibly unstable on amd64 Firefox.) However, when there's an embedded WMV, I can download it easily (DownloadEmbedded extension) and play it with a 32-bit mplayer -- if and only if my 64-bit mplayer won't work (due to ffmpeg issues you mentioned).
Only on Windows. I don't know about OS X, but I believe it just uses the version that came preloaded, which already works in Safari.
You missed my point. It's annoying as hell that Adobe is in bed with everyone and Flash is absolutely everywhere, but the actual standards -- even mpeg2 (used in DVDs, right?) -- aren't everywhere. It's annoying as hell that I have to sit through nonstandard Flash crap because people can't get their standard stuff together -- or because major OS vendors would rather play nice with Adobe than use an established standard. This is not what the Internet is supposed to be about. If it was, we wouldn't be browsing HTML pages, we'd be browsing Word docs.
It's a feature of Flash that your content will be pirated, but only by experts? That this will limit its distribution (no one's allowed to watch it on a set top box, etc), that users won't be able to go fullscreen, or even get close and have decent antialiasing, just to make it so Average Joe can't pirate, when he wouldn't be able to anyway? (DownloadEmbedded isn't for everyone.) That only the REALLY determined people, who feel like spending $20 on something to unpack the Flash files, will be able to pirate Ask a Ninja?
My point is, I know content producers see this as a feature, and they're shortsighted and stupid for doing so. DRM is a feature only when it is done so unobtrusively that people forget it's there -- and even then, it's ineffective and stupid. Here, it makes it a real pain, but not at all impossible, to extract the video stream -- especially when the only reason I want to extract it is to play it fullscreen, at a reasonable level of quality, in mplayer, xine, or VLC.
As it is, Flash is absolutely the worst at absolutely everything it does, except for the nagging little fact that it's well supported everywhere. But to me, that's "well supported" in roughly the same way that IE is "well supported" -- IE is preinstalled most everywhere, so just support IE and you're done, who cares about web standards?
Bastards. Google, too.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Previous revisions of Flash Player for Linux preformed very poorly compared to the win32 versions (even the win32 verison in crossover office did a better job).
Yeah, Tinic ranted about that on his blog a while ago, saying he used wine for Flash on Linux (before v9, obviously) -- and he's a FlashPlayer engineer. His entry about this beta release addresses performance. He says he's not happy with the current state of font rendering speed yet, but that it beats the Windows version by 20% with other stuff. They're still working on it.
Over all, you should see better performance of existing content, thanks to the new rendering engine introduced in v8. This is especially true for SWFs (competently) written for v8 and using cacheAsBitmap -- not rerendering vectors every frame seems to improve performance. Who would have thought...
The second performance increase will probably take a while to become common: FP9 comes with a new, JIT compiled VM. The old one is still included for backwards compatibility, but once FP9 has a good install base and is supported by developers making scripting-heavy stuff, you should definitely notice the performance increase -- it's much, much faster.
If somebody feels like playing with it, there's the free (beer) Flex SDK on the Adobe site somewhere. However, I'd like to recommend haXe, a Free (capital F) compiler for a very fine language, with a great type system, that I really enjoy coding in. It supports Flash 6 to 9, the Free NekoVM, and can generate JavaScript (Yes! Typed!). Windows users can use the FlashDevelop plugin, for the rest of us there's Eclipse with EHX.
LOL, so far my limited testing has been the 'click here to test install' link from the install page and the followup overview of flash twice. The video portion has worked flawlessly on all 3. The audio however hung the first time I played the overview & I got an endless loop of 'mobile de'. So, my overall impression is "I hope the final is better."
However, with that said, I don't understand why an application that just allows you to view files (rather than create or edit them) ever needs to be closed source anyway
Remember that the player is what determines what you can produce with the flash authoring application. If adobe were to open source it they'd have to go through the community each time they wanted to add a feature to the player, without really getting anything of value (to them) in return. The way I see it is that from their perspective open-sourcing the player could only lose them money, not make them money.
The irony is that the entire flash development toolchain can be replaced by open source components now. There are even several capable open source flash IDE's. At work I still use a licensed copy of flash, but at home I use the open source tools. The only part that is still proprietary is the player.
Myself, I think making your web browser act like a television was always an ill-conceived idea.
Uh huh. When was the last time you saw a "Java" site?When will folks be making .debs?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
On my Mandrake machine. I got no sound from YouTube, and sound works in the FlashPlayer7.
Notes:
Biggest problem is no sound from YouTube (or probably from anywhere). Sound works for me with FlashPlayer7 and switching back to that makes it work without any restarting (so it did not permanently mess up sound, like some programs can). This is a Mandrake machine, 2.4.22-10mdkenterprise, I really have no idea how I have sound set up, but it works for me in most software.
Yes it fixed places that check for the version number of the flash player.
Popping up the menu with the right button (which I did to check that it reported 9 or 7) would cause Firefox to crash somewhat later. Does not seem to happen with 7. May indicate an overflow of some malloc'd data buffer.
To use, put libflashplayer9.so into ~/.mozilla/plugins and don't rename it. Apparently if it exists it will be loaded in preference to libflashplayer.so. (I wasted some time making a flashplayer.so symbolic link that switched between 7 and 9 before I finally figured out that 9 was being used no matter how I set it. Instead, to switch back to 7, rename libflashplayer9.so to libflashplayer9.so.hidden).
Removal instructions in the readme.txt say to remove libflashplayer.so, not the correct file of libflashplayer9.so.
ldd shows it links in far more libraries than 7 did, lots of gtk stuff. I suspect this is due to Pango (which does I18N text layout) using the gobject library, not because any gtk widgets are being used. This has also been complained about on Cairo (which is supposed to be a drawing library *used* by toolkits like gtk, but because good font layout requires Pango, there is a circular dependency back to gtk!)
I've never seen a 'java site' if you mean a site running as an applet. I've seen some ill-conceived uses of applets, but applets never worked very well. Flash has been around for a long time and has remained popular.
Personally I virtually never come across all flash sites, except when I occasionally click through to the wrong place and end up at a site promoting a movie or a game.
My experience of the use of flash these days tends to revolve around it's use for either animated elements on a site, such as an welcome banner on a homepage, or as a generic movie player like on youtube, google video etc, which I think is a great way to deliver video, or for some online games, like those by Ferry Halim. I think these are all perfectly valid uses of the plugin and don't have any negative effect on usability.
My only complaint about Flash in and of itself (any technology can be abused) is that it's closed source, so we are at the mercy of Adobe.
An Adobe dominated web is not in-principle any better than a Microsoft dominated one.
But here we're talking "long term benefit to civilization" vs. "oohh, lookit the funny pictures!". I wonder who'll win?
I hope flashblock gets more promotion as a feature of firefox possibly even put in the default install. That way like with popup blocking, microsoft will have to include it in IE to keep up.
If we can get to the point where flash is blocked by default unless the user allows it (like popups) then advertisers will lose interest in flash ads and actually be forced to just make the advert more relevant rather than more annoying.
Flash overlays are particularly annoying. I used to work in online advertisers and the push from clients is always for the most annoying ads they can make, the only correcting force is from browser vendors.
c64 emulators!? What they trying todo? Make Flash like some sort of, even more closed Java!?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Try this:
http://new.volvocars.com/wwygavt/
Nope, no sig
No, they're not. The obvious way is to release the source code of the player under the GNU GPL and let the distros build and package it. That's probably not going to happen.
http://outcampaign.org/
"If you choose a free format such as Ogg Vorbis+Theora, then again you force the user to waste their time hunting for the plugin software, but in addition there are about five hundred sites that all distribute slightly different versions; the correct (blessed?) site is impossible to find unless the user is a computer expert."
This is why the existence of Cortado would be such a great thing, if anybody actually used it. It's still Java, but at least it lets people view Ogg without having to dig around looking for an Ogg codec. And with Java on the road toward freedom, this may eventually become an all-free option.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
The sad thing is that Flashblock doesn't even work properly if you don't have Flash (or some flash-capable plugin) installed. You still get all the annoying puzzle piece prompts... At one time, I actually built a null flash plugin to use in conjunction with Flashblock. That was the only way to get FB's arrows (and nice transparent backgrounds) to show, and to supress the puzzle pieces.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
callofduty.com just went flash8 the other day, so I went there. Seems to work well so far.
No. Why? They just add it and release it, they wouldn't even have to open their player at all, open specs would be enough to help people like the ones writing Gnash
Having the specs is not an issue. These have already been reverse-engineered, and haxe already can output flash 9 movies, with the entire featureset. What's keeping gnash back is gnash, not any external force.
My guess is that they want to sell players to the mobile phone manufacturers (considering that mobiles being all the rage at the moment, not surprising).
Bingo. Like I said, they expect that open sourcing the player would lose them money, not make them money, and they're probably not wrong. If it made business sense, they'd open source it. You can debate the ethics of the thing, but you can't debate the reality. I don't actually disagree with you that they should open source the player though, I just don't think they will.
But like I said, there's nothing holding anyone back from building an open source player. The file format is fully known in the open source flash community. And flash 9 is a wonderful development platform, so there's all the more incentive for someone to step up to the plate.
Like YouTube, Google and the majority of sites with Video these days....
Scott
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