Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."

Comments

Re:Flash itself supports H.264

[joe_cot]

====* -- Joke

    O
    \|/ --- You
    / \

His point was that the big feature for 10.1 was hardware acceleration for flash (and therefore h264), which Linux doesn't get. Linux gets nothing but downsides from this.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[russotto]

adobe is one of few major software vendors that has consistently kept their software suite going on mac, even through the bad times.

IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.

Got an Education?

[m509272]

Stupid comment, get an education. If you want to create your own Flash player you can do that. It is OPEN. Stop drinking the Apple Kool Aid without question.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

http://flowplayer.org/

http://www.swift-tools.net/Flash/

http://www.swftools.com/tools-category.php?cat=968

There are also dozens of tools that create Flash apps so you are not restricted to Adobe's tools either.

Re:Got an Education?

[dougmc]

90% of the flash content on the web does not need any more than Flash 5-6

[citation needed]

I think youtube alone will barf on anything lower than Flash 8, and they've probably got more than 10% of the "flash content" (well, content that is displayed through flash) on the web right there.

Re:Got an Education?

[Andy Dodd]

While Hulu may require 10.0.22 for the newest features, it requires 10.x just to work at all.

Critical components of Adobe's Flash implementation formerly used by Hulu (RTMPE) were never documented by Adobe, only a reverse engineered specification for RTMPE exists and anyone implementing that specification within the United States will get a DMCA takedown issued by Adobe.

Hulu has since moved to an even more "super-secret" undocumented protocol, most likely with Adobe's cooperation.

So no, Flash is not by any means open, when any attempt to create or distribute a fully compatible alternative within the United States will result in a DMCA takedown notice issued by Adobe.

nspluginwrapper

[AusIV]

I think it's worth pointing out that Ubuntu's repositories have always used 32-bit flash + nspluginwrapper even while 64-bit flash was available. I've never found either of these solutions to be particularly stable, but this doesn't mean 64-bit Linux is going without flash completely.