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Lightspark 0.4.2 Open Source Flash Player Released
suraj.sun writes "The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark developer Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is 'designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hopefully) future hardware.'
The latest release of Lightspark features better compatibility with YouTube videos, sound synchronization support and the ability to use fontconfig for font selection. Other changes include plug-in support for Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser and support for Firefox's out of process plug-in (OOPP) mode, which was added in version 3.6.4 of the browser."
At least link to the project page rather than a rehashed "news" story: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/lightspark
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Now that open source has embraces the flash standard, no doubt Adobe will add proprietary additions so sow incompatibility.
The protentially nice thing about this howerve is that if
1) it's efficient
2) not buggy
3) supports DRM
4)has the potential to run on 64 bit and ARM platforms.
I'd settle for restricting flash to site domain only.
What a novel concept!
Ceci n'est pas une
Gnash does not support version two of the Actionscript Virtual Machine. (Most new Flash content uses that AVM version.) Lightspark is intended to support exactly that. There are many other differences, but that's the main one.
That was historically true, but is no longer the case (I believe they changed the license coincident with the Open Screen Project release). See here. There are still the H.264 and On2 (as well as Nellymoser and other specific media codec) issues, but not any with open implementations of Flash itself.
graphically speaking
...the guy kind of has a point.
When this can be a drop in replacement for the vendor's version that doesn't support video acceleration on most platforms, then it will be something.
For now, it is something that just looks very promising for now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:
lex = flex
yacc = bison
sh = bash
UNIX = LINUX
vi = vim
To name just a few.
So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.
I'm trying to build it now and in case anybody wants to bitch about audio systems, it appears to use PulseAudio.
Of course I have ALSA.
Shit is going to ensue.
Indeed, try running an Adobe product using a networked home directory for example...
They want h264, which is a proprietary format controlled by a consortium they are a major member of.
I'm not sure what you mean by "major" but Apple only has 1 patent in the h264 patent pool that looks like nothing but a placeholder patent to satisfy the membership requirement.
Just compiled and installed on debian squeeze. Works with youtube, and thats about it. Hulu, pandora, grooveshark all crash firefox.
Apple's browser engine? How many times does this myth have to be corrected? KHTML was a pretty complete rendering engine before Apple adopted it under the name WebKit. It was the only major free software contender to gecko, and Apple was not the first to notice it. NOKIA used it to replace gecko in their handhelds (and they sent a nice thank you letter to the khtml mailing list). Yes, Apple did contribute a lot of code, but they did not write it. And as of now, they are not the only contributors either. So webkit is a bad example for Apple's contributions - they basically forked KHTML (and the first few releases of Safari were pretty much KHTML + a few patches) and they had no choice but to maintain it as free software because KHTML was GPL.
My understanding is that Flash has an open specification, just like PDF. So it's not the format that's proprietary, only most of the software that uses the format. This was a problem with PDF too for a long time, but now there's tons of both Free and non-Free tools for both creating and viewing PDF files.
As long as the spec is open, there's no problem; anyone can create compatible software. The problem is usually that it takes a lot longer for other people (especially F/OSS writers) to do it than the company that created the spec and has a vested interest in making it popular.
I refer you to "Interesting times for Linux Flash support" at http://lwn.net/Articles/389266/. I don't know why more (any) LWN articles aren't linked to from Slashdot.