x86 Linux Flash Player 9 is Final

Schlaegel writes "The official Adobe Linux Flash blog has announced that Flash player for x86 Linux is now final and no longer beta. Every x86 Linux user, at least those willing to load binary software, can rejoice and no longer feel like a second rate citizen. Distribution packages are also available, for example the Macromedia Fedora repository already has the flash player marked for update."

Comments

Re:x64_86

[andersbergh]

x86_64, not x64_86

No EULA???

[DoofusOfDeath]

I was getting ready to gripe about onerous EULA terms, so I started looking around for the actual text and found... nothing? I wasn't asked to accept a license agreement when installing the player, and I don't even see a license file anywhere.

Is it possible that Adobe actually did something really good here?

Re:No EULA???

[truedfx]

Here's the EULA, and here's where it's linked from. Complain away! :)

Re:No EULA???

[Raphael]

Rejoice, there is a restrictive EULA attached to the flash player! You can find it here: http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/players/flash/ .

Among other nice things, you will find a whole section about "Restrictions.", including this:

3.1 Web Player Prohibited Devices. You may not Use any Web Player on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system. For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, you may not use a Web Player on any (a) mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers (excluding Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboards or other digital signage, internet appliances or other internet-connected devices, PDAs, medical devices, ATMs, telematic devices, gaming machines, home automation systems, kiosks, remote control devices, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television systems or (c) other closed system devices.

• You are using Linux in your media center and thinking about using Flash? Nope, this is forbidden!
• You are using Linux in your tablet PC or web pad (e.g., Nokia N770 or N800) and thinking about using Flash? Nope, this is forbidden!
• You are using Linux in your PDA? Again, no!
• ...

Go on, complain! Oh, and just in case you have any doubt about what is the "Web Player", this is explained in the first paragraph of the EULA: "(collectively, the Flash, Shockwave and Authorware players, are the "Web Players")"

Re:Yeah, so, what.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Not having a plugin installed in FF displays a yellow bar and not a grey box.
2. You can download and extract videos wrapped in flash and play them using mplayer, VLC or Xine.
3. Acrobat reader is bloated but Foxit make a great PDF reader for windows or you could use gsview.

I can't stand flash but why are you beating on Adobe? They're a company like any other and the tamarin project and Adobe source libraries show that some engineers and managers "get it". Glad to see you modded troll.

Re:Just like Windows...

[Lumpy]

Fun part. Most of the crap done with flash can be done with the really old flash 5 or 6. I only dabble in flash but the added features in the newer flash engines are outweighed by the "pain in the ass" factor to the viewing person and the incompatabilities that can exist.

I am sure some flash guru's out there can do fantastic things with the new stuff but most dont need it.

Re:Amd64 rules (sure intel 64 does as well)

[archen]

Using Gentoo (yes I use Gentoo) I've seen a noticeable increase as well using exactly the same apps, with only the compile arch changing. I'm not sure about 15% but I have seen a difference. My original system was compiled against an athlon-xp (-02), so most of the processor features since the i686 was introduced were in there. Going to an athlon64 (-02) basically added some sse things in the compile. Unless sse is responsible for the fair performance increase - which I doubt - then I would say just moving to 64bit and getting some features like twice as many registers gives you a decent speed upgrade.

Re:Just like Windows...

[truedfx]

The Flash specification is not open. It is freely available, but may not be used to create Flash players, only Flash creators.

Re:Just like Windows...

[YGingras]

Sorry, but as far as I know, flash specification is open

You are wrong, the licence of the spec explicitly deny you the right to reimplement it:

3)a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders .swf files.

Re:This is Great

[Nutria]

Life just wouldn't be complete without the ability to fully experience those spastic dancing silhouettes on lowermybills.com ads.

With an ad-blocker and Flash, you get the "best" of both worlds: You Tube *and* (relatively) ad-less surfing.

Brilliant!!

Re:Any vacancies in the i-still-hate-flash dept.?

[kryptkpr]

There is nothing inherently evil about JavaScript, get a hold of yourself.

I almost never want to see the garbage that Flash is used for, but I almost always want the functionality you get when JavaScript is enabled.

Flashblock is the appropriate balance of convenience and annoyance for the average user.

Finally, ALSA support

[massysett]

Flash Player 7 for Linux used OSS. This required loading the ALSA-OSS compatibility modules, or or using aoss. Both methods had occasional quirks. I'll be glad to get rid of my last OSS application.

Re:Finally, ALSA support

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have switched to ALSA, but after trying it out, it seemed to me that the mixer controls made absolutely no sense with my soundcard, so I switched back to OSS.

You are aware that OSS is obsolete, aren't you? You know that OSS drivers are being removed from the Linux kernel for all devices that have a stable ALSA driver? Several OSS drivers have already been removed from the previous kernel release. You know that OSS has severe limitations, especially if you have more than one sound card or sound device in your system?

If you have issues with the mixer controls, maybe you should consider switching to a better mixer application? There are plenty of them available for ALSA.

Re:x64_86

[gigne]

Yeah, perfectly is you don't mind it crapping out Firefox on some sites. Thank god for session saver.

Re:Gentoo is First

[lowlands]

For Fedora Core users you can go to this website: http://macromedia.mplug.org/
It has the required yum repo file that you need to install the flash-plugin with yum.
Quick howto:
$ wget -v http://macromedia.mplug.org/macromedia-i386.repo
$ sudo mv macromedia-i386.repo /etc/yum.repos.d
$ sudo yum install flash-plugin

Restart Firefox for the plugin to become active.

If you already have that repo file installed you can upgrade the flash-plugin with:
$ sudo yum upgrade flash-plugin

Thanks Adobe. Hopefully we'll see a 64bit version soon.

Re:Finally!

[CrankyOldFart]

Now you too can load Flashblock and browse the web unfettered by all that ridiculous bandwidth hogging flash crap!

Re:Why?

[Salsaman]

There was no flash 8 for Linux, and a lot of sites were using it. They should all work now with this new player.

Slowpokers.

[Qbertino]

Flash 7 Linux was nearly in sync with the other plattforms. They took quite some time for FLash 9 (more than a year). According to Macromedia Labs it was because they redid the entire codebase and now can move on faster in xplattform developement. That's why they skipped Flash 8.
I'm inclined to believe them.
And, being a professional Flash developer who deploys all his webstuff on Linux aswell I am now going to update from Flash MX 2k4 Pro IDE to the newest. Support Flash on Linux and I'll continue using it, drop it and I'll be off to Java/Xul/Whatever before you can say "people want cross-plattform RIA". It's that simple.

Bottom line:
Nice job. Took you long enough. Be faster next time or you'll have one flasher less.

(Now all we need is a fresh batch of O'Reillys to go with ActionScript 3 and I'm set. :-) )

Re:x64_86

[The_Dougster]

There is also Gnash which is a clean-room implementation of Flash. I run Gentoo amd64 with no 32-bit compatibility libs, and I have the Gnash plugin working on my system.

Re:Any vacancies in the i-still-hate-flash dept.?

[kryptkpr]

You'd have to be daft to to allow javascript on any random site.

First, that's a terrible argument. See here for an explanation why.

Second, why do you believe this? What is the worst thing a random piece of JavaScript can really do? Steal the cookie with my login info for Slashdot?

If you use Internet Explorer, I will agree with you. I would even go further and not allow anything through to that browser from any random site, other then maybe images.

But with Firefox or just about any another browser, these types of things happen VERY, VERY infrequently. When they do, I follow tech news and will in most cases be patched before I ever come across the exploit in the wild. The hassle of having to re-enable JavaScript all the time isn't worth the "risk" for users like me.

OpenLaszlo YouTube Player Demo and Source Code

[SimHacker]

The problem with Real, QuickTime, Windows Media and all the other video players, is that all they are just stupid video players boxed into a rectangular prison, and not customizable or adaptable in any way. You can't add to their user interface, or fix their horrible design problems. No control over how closed captioning is presented. No transparent video overlays. No extra buttons or links to related videos. No webcam support or two-way video conferencing.

From a user interface design perspective, Flash has an enormous advantage over old-school video players, because developers are able to deeply customize and integrate the video player into their own user interfaces, like Google's and YouTube's video players, the OpenLaszlo YouTube player, or the SimFaux Network TV Fox News Simulation.

The other overwhelming advantage to Flash over all the other video players, is that it's installed on way more platforms than any other existing video player. So the fact that it has almost universal coverage, plus the fact that you can customize the user interface (like YouTube, Google Video, and everyone else does), combine to make Flash the hands-down best way to distribute video over the internet.

Here's an example of what I mean by customization: A set of reusable video playback and recording components that I've developed for OpenLaszlo, which are easy to customize and integrate into your own OpenLaszlo applications:

OpenLaszlo YouTube Player Demo and Source Code

I've been working on developing streaming video support for OpenLaszlo: LZX classes to support improved audio and video, including RTMP streaming via Flash Media Server (aka Flash Communication Server) and also the Red5 Open Source Flash Server, as well as streaming video via http. It supports playback of recorded FLVs, recording from camera and microphone, live two-way (or multi-party) audio/video conferencing, and FLV streaming over http.

It's easy to use the OpenLaszlo video components, because they're nicely integrated with the OpenLaszlo programming model. They expose logical attributes and events which make it easy to integrate video into OpenLaszlo applications.

To test it out the code and demonstrate its functionality, I've developed a simple YouTube Player in OpenLaszlo [click here to open it in a window]. It uses the YouTube ReST Web API, and some simple html screen scraping to get the URL parameters to stream the FLV file directly.

Here is the source for the test application wrapper that puts the YouTube video player in a resizable window, and the more interesting source for the youtubeplayer component, that uses the new OpenLaszlo video classes I'm developing (whose source is in this directory).

The new video classes and the YouTube player demo are now checked into the OpenLaszlo svn repository.