Slashdot Mirror
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
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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
then it answers apple's complaints about flash and Youtube's complaints about H264. The problme for apple was that it would be insane to make your player beholden to a closed 3rd party app, espeically one from a company that hsitorically dragged it's heels in incorproating your platforms new features. Apple thrives on offering distinguishing features and adobe smothers them if they don't incorporate them.
But if the source is open apple is free to make sure it keeps up. So long as it is not as buggy as flash was.
Likewise youtube complained they could not monetize Video under H264 as well as under flash. the ability to have linking and overlays and such was required for the cash register.
Again this is now possible if this supports DRM.
One nice thing is that since apple already has a sandboxing system in both OSX and iOS, having it open source may allow them to get a tighter sandbox. No need to count on Adobe's sandbox working.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I seem to remember that the real problem Flash clones is that documentation is not completely free and if you read it you have to be under strong NDA for the rest of your life. This should also be why Gnash always lags behind. How did he overcome this issue? Or are we waiting for a lawsuit to strike as soon as the plugin becomes usable?
By my count there are atleast 4 opensource flash project. Most of them seem to exist just for the developer's own benefit. Is there any analysis or review and comparison of the several open source flash clones?
I'd settle for restricting flash to site domain only.
What a novel concept!
Ceci n'est pas une
...is it secure?
Maybe, maybe not.
But that condescending reply in response to an informal feature request is terrible.
You give open source a bad name.
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.
Chico and Harpo on the problems with Flash substitutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Ovh18nYwc
"Alright never mind c'mon we work without it.."
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Gnash doesn't support ActionScript 3. Lightspark does. There has been talk on the Gnash list for a hybrid solution.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Will it work with www.hulu.com?
Offer -cash-?
Cash?!
s/cash/money
(Note to self, no more colloquialisms on Slashdot.)
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
...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 good news: it's an open-source Flash player
The bad news: for better compatibility with web browsers, it's written in Flash
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.
I seem to remember that the real problem Flash clones is that documentation is not completely free and if you read it you have to be under strong NDA for the rest of your life. This should also be why Gnash always lags behind. How did he overcome this issue? Or are we waiting for a lawsuit to strike as soon as the plugin becomes usable?
The creator of the project trained a chimpansee to understand code, a literal code-monkey if you will or rather a code-ape to be more accurate. This code-ape then reads the Flash documentation and explains it with sign language to the project creator. Since the code-ape cannot be properly held to an NDA the project continues unencumbered by draconian laws or demonic contracts.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
On a feature level, for the entire browser+addons stack, I agree that that is an extremely useful feature. Sturgeon's law applies, hard, to flash and most of it deserves to be blocked.
Architecturally, though, isn't the flash renderer plugin a silly place for blacklisting/whitelisting/domain control features? The browser is responsible for issuing the HTTP requests, rendering what it can, calling plugins for what it can't, and so forth. Why should the browser download the flash blob, load the renderer, and then have the renderer check a blacklist and allow or refuse rendering of the object?
Wouldn't it make much more sense for that to be handled at the browser level, with the renderer invoked only if you want the flash rendered?
i386 protected mode OS
ext2/3
emacs
Perl, Python and others
decss
bayesian spam filtering
eclipse
To name a few more. Proprietary is not necessarily first, just the first to try and make profit from the project.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
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.
It still surprises me that this came from the open source community AND that to this day no commercial OS has anything close.
That's because packaging systems exist primarily to address problems that - by and large - don't exist on "commercial OSes": cascading webs of slightly incompatible software versions (ie: "dependency hell") and ease of installation.
You appear to have made a pretty much random list of technologies/programs - why?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Flash Player is a bloated slow pig of a program. Windows users need a Flash Player alternative just as much as Linux users do.
So when I hear about a release, I look for the Standalone EXE player, which unfortunately doesn't exist.
I also wonder how this compares to Gnash. I've tested out Gnash, and it crashed on several SWF files I played through the program on Windows. Gnash also obviously wasn't designed at all to run on Windows, since it is missing the essential feature of Drag-Drop files onto the standalone player window.