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Linux Now an Equal Flash Player
nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.
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Some of us have been waiting a lot longer for flash9 and still don't have it for wii, iphone, and I believe even the Opera web browser.
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If I recall correctly, it was six months after the release of Flash 9 for Windows when Linux got it, but there wasn't even a Flash 8 for Linux. Linux users had actually been waiting for a new release since the release of Flash 7.
umm......
GASH?
They have published the specs and the FOSS player isn't soup yet. So stop complaining and start coding buddy.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
So get to work...
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nspluginwrapper blows.
There's no nice way to put it. It crashes, or "loses connection" to the plugin half the time.
The flash specs used to be half-open (free, but the license only allowed you to use them to write flash files, not to read them). A few months ago, they released them for implementing players too. And they've open sourced the ActionScript engine (basically a - very - modern Smalltalk VM).
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Or for anybody who listens to BBC radio, it's the only linux method supported.
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The iPhone SDK T&Cs prevent using it for writing anything that loads third-party code, which eliminates Flash as a possible thing to port (and Java, Python, whatever).
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If you want suboptimal performance why not just go back to windows?
The performance difference between 64-bit and 32-bit is not nearly as big as between 32-bit and 16-bit. When making the transition to 32-bit, things were pretty much faster across the board. With 64-bit, the case isn't so cut and dried. On x86 machines, running in 64-bit mode, you get a couple of things. The biggest is a larger virtual address space, which lets you work with more than 4GB at once. You also get larger general purpose registers, and more registers to play with. Generally, larger registers aren't really needed. Things like MMX and SSE have already given us the ability to process data in 128-bit chunks if we need to, and I'd bet most things that really need large registers are already using SSE. More registers are nice, but they only help in compute-bound circumstances. Most of the time these days, you're I/O bound.
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
I hate to disrupt a good theory with references, but What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition claims the main issue is that rewriting the JIT compiler to emit 64-bit code is non-trivial.
OK, Just in case anyone was about to answer...the answer is *YES*. Finally flash is useable on all sites it was intended to be!
in this case the specs aren't enough. watch this report by the gnash project leader, rob savoye: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoNvsiBTQDE
he explains that the agreement for the specs for adobe flash prohibits you from working on a competing implementation if you have ever used adobe's flash plugin. the report was made after adobe released the documentation.
And the benefits (even on Flash 9 sites, without the new features in 10) are significant:
Better performance and smoother graphics
The fullscreen video mode is no longer choppy
Unfortunately, there's a significant drawback as well:
Often crashes my browser as soon as I visit a page with Flash.
(or at least crashes the plugin process, when using a browser smart enough to isolate plugins from the main system)
Obviously I got to enjoy Flash 10 for a while before it started dying on me. Wiping my .macromedia directory doesn't seem to restore the stable behavior. Neither does reinstalling flash. Did Hulu change their video format in some subtle way that breaks just my system? I don't know, but he official Flash 10 breaks too, not just the betas. Unless anyone here has any good ideas, back to 9 it is.
Honestly, I didn't know Real was still around. I wouldn't let that software near my windows machines, much less the Linux ones.
It's funny, actually, but the Linux version of RealPlayer is not loaded with garbage. It just looks like a vanilla video player. It is not at all like the Windows version.
http://www.oiloja.com.br/ - Brazilian cellphone carrier I use. They had a transparent Flash that covered everything - now it WORKS!
http://www.formula1.com/ seems to be OK too.
Anyone has other sites with that problem so we can test more?
It's a browser dependency. The search term you're seeking is "WMODE". Some browsers allow compositing. Others don't. Others are quirky.
Mike Melanson has some info, current as of a few months ago, here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/07/turkish_localization_also_wmod_1.html
Release Notes from today seem to say that FF3/Linux is supporting it well, although I'm not certain if that's for all Linux or just most:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html#features_ocre
jd/adobe
That is exactly what I was refering to: Flash under nspluginwrapper always crashes especially when I am running a site that uses flash while trying to watch a Youtube video.
:)
Gnash is OK but still has alot of work, especially when it comes to YouTube. The video on Youtube works but everything else is screwed up (flash based, i.e. controls). It definatally has alot of potential but its just not quite there yet and cant wait until it is
Currently the most reliable way to go is 32-bit firefox with a native flash plugin.
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Flash has nothing to do with any of this. The codecs, container, and streaming technology Flash/FLV uses are exactly the same as used in The Bad Old Days. In fact they're really quite sub-par today (Sorenson Spark, MP3, and even VP6).
The only difference is that you've got a higher speed connection today than you did the last time you used RealPlayer, or Quicktime, or Windows Media Player.
Point of fact... Flash 9 added support for MP4/H.264/AAC files. Exactly the same format used by Quicktime for years and years.
Other players are infinitely more flexible, higher performance, etc., than Flash could ever hope to be. An animation plug-in, loading a player applet, loading a video, in a browser, was never a good idea. It just caught on because so many people already had flash installed.
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Close all the tabs that have loaded Flash content in them, then nspluginwrapper will work again without restarting the whole browser.