Gotuit Online Player Now Available for Linux

VidMan writes, "The Gotuit.com free online video player now works for Linux users with the recent Flash 9 beta release. When the Gotuit site was released in late July, one of the key questions from Slashdot users was when the site would be available for Linux. The site is an online video destination for music videos, news, weather, and sports that uses the Flash media player to deliver video."

Comments

And this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some obscure video site now works on x86-linux using beta-stage proprietary software. I fail to see the importance.

Re:And this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's Gnash, too, a GNU project that displays Flash animations and supports at least some of SWF v7, while other players only go up to v4. But they rejected my submission of that.

That was the key question?

[5E-0W2]

By the looks of it, the key question was "why should we care?" or possibly "why don't they have any content?" (the word slashvertisement also came up, but not as a question). So this boils down to non-interesting site that requires flash 9 still requires flash 9 but now flash 9 for linux is out, an event which got its own article.

Re:That was the key question?

[Kangburra]

There must be a click counter somewhere in there.

The site is pure flash so I guess Linux users couldn't see it before, now then can, but why they'd want to is beyond me! :-(

Re:That was the key question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding?!? That site is all Web2.0 and stuff!

Re:That was the key question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough is enough, I have had it with these motherfucking muslims on this motherfucking plane!

errr.... no

[nachmore]

Unfortunately, although you can see the site, it isn't playing anything apart from the Gotuit logo ad - which, although pretty, is not my idea of fun.

I'm heading back to youtube...

Does it support Linux?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

That's not a real question. It's one of those in-jokes amongst the geeks here that's trotted out every time something new is announced.

It's like "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" No one really cares one way or the other whether you actually do go out and build a Beowulf cluster of nanotube space elevators. It's just something we say.

Re:Does it support Linux?

[Lord Kano]

No one really cares one way or the other whether you actually do go out and build a Beowulf cluster of nanotube space elevators. It's just something we say.

At one time we actually did care.

Unfortunately, neither Google nor Slashdot itself has indexed posts from that long ago.

See?

LK

x86-64

[WhodoVoodoo]

So is there a 64bit build yet?

Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Raphael]

Considering that the proprietary Flash player fails to run at all on my Athlon64 and Opteron sytstems, I would say that it does not support Linux. It just supports a subset of the 32-bits x86 Linux platforms, that's all.

I also have several ARM-based devices running Linux (Nokia N770, Linksys NSLU2) and it does not work on these either.

Sorry, but that was a bad slashvertisement for something that does not even support Linux correctly.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition

I have been asked to clarify the 64-bit situation in light of the recent Flash Player 9 beta for Linux (which, as some have lamented, should have been labeled as the beta for Linux/i386). So here it is:

The Flash Player 9 beta Players (plugin and standalone) are compiled as Linux i386 ELF files. These binaries are designed to operate natively on i386-class computers.

However, you may have read forums and comments about people running the beta successfully on x86_64 machines (a.k.a. AMD64 or EM64T). Yes, it is possible, though the setup is not as straightforward as with an i386 machine. There are basically two approaches:

      1. Run an i386 kernel and pure i386 system on your x86_64 machine-- not a great solution, but it works
      2. Run a limited i386 system inside your x86_64 machine-- in this approach, you run a pure 64-bit system but with just enough 32-bit support libraries to enable the i386 Flash Player to run

Some Linux distros make this 32-bit support process more ergonomic than others. I see that my favored distro, Gentoo, has a masked ebuild for the AMD64 architecture.

What about a native 64-bit binary? Tinic summed it up succinctly in his Linux beta post:

        What about 64bit? There is no Windows 64bit or OS X 64bit version either right now. As I said before it is not a question of 'recompiling' the source code, there is lots of generic non platform specific work which needs to be finished first. We will ship a 64bit version for Windows, OS X Leopard and GNU/Linux. It will happen. When? ... When it is ready.

64-bit support is not just a recompile away. And no, this is not due to treating memory pointers and 32-bit integers interchangeably. There are assorted non-portable pieces that need to be upgraded first, notably the JIT compiler in the virtual machine (transforms ActionScript into native x86_64 code) and the garbage collection engine. Tinic outlined these items in this post.

One more item: A number of users have noted that the minimum requirements for the beta Player list 128 MB of video RAM. I have no idea where that number came from but I'm pretty sure it's overstated. Don't be afraid to test the beta even if you have significantly less VRAM.

Posted by Mike Melanson at 04:43 PM | Permalink |

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha ha! Great... So in order to be able to view a web site of questionable interest, I would have to bastardize my clean 64bit systems and install a bunch of 32bit compatibility libs. Or just forget about the whole 64bit thing and run a 32bit kernel on these machines. Suuuurrrre.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Sancho]

Then Wine doesn't support Linux either, I guess? Or any piece of Linux software which isn't directly ported to work on evert obscure piece of hardware that Linux supports?

Please, this is pedantry at best and trolling at worst.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[chromatic]

The first paragraph of Wine HQ explicitly says that Wine runs on x86 Unixes. That's hardly ambiguous.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Sancho]

The summary wasn't ambiguous either:

The Gotuit.com free online video player now works for Linux users with the recent Flash 9 beta release.

Note the "with the recent Flash 9 beta release" which implies that Gotuit doesn't work if you don't have the Flash 9 beta release. The requirements are clearly stated.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Raphael]

Well, call this pendantry if you want but yes, I would say that any piece of software that only runs on one specific architecture does not really support Linux.

To be more specific, I have three computers around me right now: one of them is an Athlon 64 which runs fine in 64bit mode without any old 32bit libs. The other one is a Sun SPARC workstation running Solaris right now but I can also run Linux on it. The third one is a N770. All of them run Linux. None of them supports 32bit x86 code. So it is not a theoretical problem when I say that some software does not really support Linux if it is tied to a single architecture: I simply cannot run it on my Linux systems.

Well, to be fair I should mention that I could also use my old laptop which does run 32bit Linux, but it would be inconvenient to use that slow laptop just so that I can install the Flash player and view some site that I am probably not very interested in. In any case, all the computers that I have bought recently or that I am planning to buy are either 64bit only or are using CPUs that are not x86-compatible.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[dbIII]

Then Wine doesn't support Linux either, I guess?

It runs quite well on 64 bit linux on an amd64 - and now that I've recently started playing WoW via wine I run almost nothing else.

Re:Sorry, it does not support Linux

[Sancho]

How well does it work on PPC, or other non-x86-based architectures?

FLash 9, still no 64 bit version!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since flash 9 still lacks support for 64 bit platforms but i don't care about flash because they use wrong most of the times anyway (in my humble opinion, it eats to much bandwidth). No i don't want to run 32 binaries.

Come on now Adobe, there's 64 bit GNU/Linux, Windows XP pro 64 (and upcomming Vista 64 bit), *BSD 64 bit. I wonder if there is a 64 bit PowerPC version for MAC OS X (can someone enlighten me if there is one?).

Hoping Adobe sees the light, there is always hope ;).

False Error Message: Java Script Disabled ...

[Herschel Cohen]

Indeed it was enabled, albeit temporarily. If this does not suffice, why trust them?

Gotuit?

[jb.hl.com]

Neverheardofit.

Seriously, this sounds like an ad more than anything. I've never heard of Gotuit.