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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.
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!
That's a bug with your distro: report it to them.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Oh joy, I suppose the Solaris version will come only one year after Linux. Hang on folks, we're almost there!
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.
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.
www.homestarrunner.com
Now I can enjoy all that forbidden Weebl & Bob Pie without the wine. I don't have to be drunk & dirty anymore.
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?
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.
"What are some good sites that require flash8/flash9..."
:)
I think that is an oxymoron of sorts
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(){}'
Flash Player 9 for Windows was officially released on June 28, 2006.
4 months != 1 year
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?
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
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 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.
I'd love to be able to use Gnash as it'd be one less piece of closed source software on my (x86) machine (except for those nVidia drivers, games, FPGA tools, etc., etc., etc.,). It'd be very useful on Linux/PPC, as occasionally you do need flash.
In any case, if I wanted Flash 9 support, rather than Flash 7, Gnash is sadly useless.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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?