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64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha

Posted by Soulskill on from the new-and-shiny dept.

Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."

22 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. This isn't news... by AllyGreen · · Score: 5, Informative

    The 64 bit flash player has been in alpha for over a year....

    1. Re:This isn't news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The date on the article is November 19, 2008. Even by Slashdot standards, this is ridiculously old news.

    2. Re:This isn't news... by AllyGreen · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wow, just checked the date of the first article thats linked in the summary, nov 19th 2008!

    3. Re:This isn't news... by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Informative

      64-bit enthusiasts?

      x86-64 is THE de-facto architecture. Save the enthusiast label for all the retro x86 steam punk guys.

    4. Re:This isn't news... by ZombieWomble · · Score: 4, Informative
      This article seems to have popped up because Adobe have indeed released an updated version of the flash player on the 11th of this month. Still alpha, but slightly newer. Pleasingly, it seems to have fixed the only persistent bug I had with the player (which caused Firefox to report a crash every time it was closed - no actual errant behaviour, however).

      Why exactly the submitter picked at year-and-a-bit old article as a reference for this news is still a mystery, however.

    5. Re:This isn't news... by dan325 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      64-bit enthusiasts?

      x86-64 is THE de-facto architecture. Save the enthusiast label for all the retro x86 steam punk guys.

      no kidding. I can't stand Flash. Heck, the 32-bit Linux version is barely passable. The web would be so much better off if people just used open standards for web sites. With javascript and CSS, you can do all sorts of cool stuff and it'll run perfectly on any platform -- even my PowerPC Linux box.

      How's the PowerPC Linux port of Flash coming, Adobe? right...

    6. Re:This isn't news... by Minwee · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How's the PowerPC Linux port of Flash coming, Adobe? right...

      The amd64, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390 and sparc ports all seem to be coming along...

      Oh wait, you wanted _Adobe_ to do something about it? I'm pretty sure they fired the only developer who understood their codebase years ago.

    7. Re:This isn't news... by Sillygates · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've been using it for at least a year, probably edging toward a year and a half...

      Now I'll be waiting for someone to realize that the beta java plugin *just* became available....

      --
      I fear the Y2038 bug
  2. Downtime is the name of the game by Coopjust · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Man, Flash Player locks up the CPU and crashes more often with gold releases than most alpha software. I think you'd have to be sadist to run software in alpha for Linux from Adobe.

    Seriously, I hope it leads to an improvement for the Flash Player for the platform- it's sorely needed.

    On another note, I was surprised to hear that H.264 GPU video acceleration in Flash Player 10.1, in addition to being limited to very new cards, only works on Windows, the platform with the most stable Flash Player (stable is relative).

    1. Re:Downtime is the name of the game by corychristison · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Man, Flash Player locks up the CPU and crashes more often with gold releases than most alpha software. I think you'd have to be sadist to run software in alpha for Linux from Adobe.

      Really? Honestly I haven't ever had any real issues with Flash since I've been running the 64bit release of about a year ago.
      Even before that I had minimal issues running the 32bit version under 64bit Firefox via NSPluginWrapper.
      I'm running Gentoo Linux and it works fine. No crashing, no lagging aside from trying to run YouTube in fullscreen doesn't always work out so swell (24" LCD @ 1920x1200 resolution). I suppose that's the lack of H/W acceleration.
      I also don't have any issues using Adobe Reader. Maybe I am just lucky?

    2. Re:Downtime is the name of the game by Coopjust · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I wasn't aware it's over a year since the 64-bit alpha was released.

      On Fedora & Ubuntu I had a lot of issues with the 32-bit plugin, especially run using the wrapper for x64 Firefox.

      Adobe Reader is fine for me, but it's a security nightmare compared to other PDF readers.

    3. Re:Downtime is the name of the game by Godji · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm running Gentoo Linux and it works fine.

      There's your answer. We Gentoo users have a slightly distorted definition of "works fine" :D

      (Disclaimer: I kid.)

    4. Re:Downtime is the name of the game by diegocg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The Adobe Linux guys wrote a blog post explaining why Adobe Flash is so slow. It seems that because Flash needs to mix the video image with other flash controls, it can't accelerate video like a typical player does. It seems that the HTML5 people have the same problem.

      "The key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data. Their counterpart Windows drivers do allow this which is why this feature is supported in Windows.

      That's for Linux. What about Mac? I'm not sure but my Mac colleagues have mentioned something about Apple not making their hardware decoding APIs available to applications (if the APIs exist at all, which I'm not sure they do)"

    5. Re:Downtime is the name of the game by Dr.Syshalt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I develop Flex application on Linux right now, using Intellij IDEA + Flex SDK from Adobe.

      Quite complex GUI application, with numerous connected graphs, grids, sliders - one that would be just impossible to develop using AJAX or whatnot.

      Zero problems so far. Everything works properly, including Flash debugging in 32-bit SeaMonkey (there is no 64-bit debug version of Flash on neither platform, so 64 bit is for usual browsing). The app is working, I'm going to release it today or tomorrow - yes, Flash application + server part on Perl with JSON bindings, developed 100% on Linux. It would be masochistic to develop it using "HTML5" or whatever buzzword you wanted to use as a replacement for Flash. Flash is here and it works - I don't care what your theories say

    6. Re:Downtime is the name of the game by h4rr4r · · Score: 2, Informative

      The douchebag who writes that blog can be ignored, gnash has VA-API support already.

      Adobe should just fund gnash or at least find a better linux developer for their port.

  3. Old news, slight revision, still broken Hulu. by proxima · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is another revision over previous 64-bit Flash revisions. I've been using it for months, mostly without trouble.

    Around mid-January though, Hulu broke with all Linux clients running 64-bit Flash. You get "Sorry, we are unable to stream this video", and the support forum is full of people reporting it. As far as I know Hulu has provided no response, and there are rumors that something related to video DRM that Hulu enabled (must be recently) is not supported in the 64-bit Flash player yet. Workarounds including using the Hulu desktop (which some report as buggy), watching at least some of the videos via Fancast (which I didn't even know existed), or using the 32-bit plugin. I just tried this 10.0.45 release and it has the same problem.

    --
    "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
    1. Re:Old news, slight revision, still broken Hulu. by raddan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, that's not true. Hulu mostly works fine for me in 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 and the latest Firefox. I'm running the latest Flash alpha. I can watch the videos, but the player controls are unusable (clicking on them does nothing). Fortunately, Hulu Desktop works, although the video is occasionally a little glitchy.

      Now Netflix, that's a different story. Videos are unwatchably glitchy unless I use IE, where they play fine (yes, on Windows).

    2. Re:Old news, slight revision, still broken Hulu. by TheQuantumShift · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The interesting part was that I was able to watch hulu content being fed from fancast. They just redirected the video stream, didn't even bother rebranding. So to be clear:
      • All other flash video and apps seem to work fine (youtube, flash heavy sites and games).
      • Hulu's video stream works fine when viewed via another site or hulu's desktop client using the same flash plugin.
      • The only place it doesn't work is in the browser, at hulu.com.

      The only answer I come up with is that they're blacklisting linux x64 on the site. The only sense I can make of that is that they're going to migrate to a desktop client only model (to lock out other sites and devices like boxee and playon) And they're starting with the smallest portion of their users. Add this to all the talk about subscriptions and it sounds very plausible...

      Of course I could be wrong and there could be a benign explanation.

      --

      Shift happens. Fire it up.
  4. And In Other News by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft has just announced the release of Windows Vista, predicting that it will surely be the best selling operating system the Redmond, WA based company has ever released.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  5. Flash for the 64bit DEC Alpha !! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Finally,

    Though wouldn't a PPC Linux binary be more useful?

  6. Re:What was the previous release? by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Funny

    You ascii a stupid question, you get a stupid ansi. ::ducks::

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  7. Re:Countdown timer initiated by StuartHankins · · Score: 2, Informative

    Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor