Linux Now an Equal Flash Player 437
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.
Too bad they can't make text input work (Score:2, Informative)
Non-ascii text input has been broken forever.
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-40 [adobe.com]
Dear Grandma, (Score:4, Informative)
Did you fix the cookies [slashdot.org] yet?
And what about the embedded version for wii/etc? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:2, Informative)
It was worse than that... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No deal. (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [gnu.org]
So get to work...
Re:The future? (Score:5, Informative)
nspluginwrapper blows.
There's no nice way to put it. It crashes, or "loses connection" to the plugin half the time.
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:3, Informative)
I have Real on my Nokia, to play movies with. It works. I also have Adobe Acrobat to read PDFs on my phone. I never got that to work. Both programs came with the phone.
Re:No deal. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All platforms? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The future? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:actual history (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, Linux folk did have an unusually lengthy gap back then. Worse, it coincided with the rise in YouTube popularity, so the gap was felt particularly acutely.
Video was added in Player 6. Player 8 was a massive re-architecture of the graphics engine. This was also due to include a re-architecture of the logics engine, but the latter was re-scheduled out into Player 9 timeframe. Rather than make a graphics-oriented Linux Player which would need to be rev'd in six months, the Linux Player went straight from v7 to v9. It was pain, but it's over now.
Flash/Linux has been an emphasis from the start:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815054538/www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alternates/ [archive.org]
jd/adobe
Re:No 64-bit (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to disrupt a good theory with references, but What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition [adobe.com] claims the main issue is that rewriting the JIT compiler to emit 64-bit code is non-trivial.
Re:No 64-bit (Score:3, Informative)
I agree that a version for the Solaris Sparc platform is a slight negative, but I bet that version is a 32-bit version as well.
There are liberties you can take when you can assume that some particular integer type and a pointer type are interchangeable, or that pointers have some particular internal structure. Most 64-bit platforms break all those assumptions.
In particular, on x86_64 the pointer is specifically structured so you can't steal either the high or low bits to represent some other sort of data. And the 'int' type in most compilers is still 32 bits, you have to use 'long' or even 'long long' to get a 64 bit integer type.
So, I think sloppy and bad programming practices are still the likely culprit.
Re:Flash appearing ontop of pages in linux/firefox (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Flash Cookies fix available for some time now (Score:1, Informative)
See:
http://objection.mozdev.org/index.html
The development release: /home/USERNAME/.macromedia/Flash_Player
http://downloads.mozdev.org/objection/objection-0_4_0b1-fx-sm.xpi works great for me but there is one bug that requires you to define the directory by hand:
Re:No deal. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The future? (Score:2, Informative)
I've tried Linux Flash 10 betas (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The future? (Score:1, Informative)
I've had great experiences with Flash 10 Beta with ndiswrapper. Haven't had a crash since I installed it 2 weeks ago.
Flash 9 crashed every 2 YouTube video loads on average...
Re:No deal. (Score:1, Informative)
Looking forward to it? You can start here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org]
YES! YES! Transparency IS solved! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.oiloja.com.br/ [oiloja.com.br] - Brazilian cellphone carrier I use. They had a transparent Flash that covered everything - now it WORKS!
http://www.formula1.com/ [formula1.com] seems to be OK too.
Anyone has other sites with that problem so we can test more?
Re:It still obscures drop down menus (Score:3, Informative)
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 [adobe.com]
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 [adobe.com]
jd/adobe
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:YAY another binary release (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Some more equal than others... (Score:3, Informative)
RHEL 4 and CentOS 4 are 99.9% the same, there's no point in counting both. Plus, the number of people who use either on desktops are in the extreme minority, I would think, as they're not desktop oriented distros.
Flash 10 hangs my browser (Score:2, Informative)
This is on Linux (Slackware 12.1.0)
Re:64-Bit support? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The future? (Score:4, Informative)
Close all the tabs that have loaded Flash content in them, then nspluginwrapper will work again without restarting the whole browser.
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:3, Informative)
Although Mplayer etc. can play real audio, they make a pretty bad job of it: being prone to failing mid stream and unable to skip forwards or backwards - on the other hand mplayer can record realaudio which the official player cannot, and all the open source players work with pulseaudio.
Re:YAY another binary release (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux people, I want your platform to succeed.. (Score:2, Informative)
"...if it the Flash format was open, documented and reimplementable..."
It is. But the third-party codecs Adobe licenses for redistribution aren't, so it's still hard to see how to get a functional clone.
The SWF format has been published for a decade, just like HTML. A few years ago reading rights were traded for the promise to not fracture Flash's distributed predictability, but by now that has loosened too. Here's a starting point:
http://www.openscreenproject.org/ [openscreenproject.org]
jd/adobe
Re:Don't forget performance. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Hey, thanks for the tip. I turned off desktop effects (I'm using Ubuntu, and I believe that the Desktop Effects feature is Compiz?), and after turning that off, it did seem to improve the playback of flash quite a bit. (It also seemed to fix full-screen playback; previously, whenever I tried to switch a stream to fullscreen view, it would immediately snap back to windowed view, and I couldn't figure out why it was doing that). I didn't realize there was a conflict with Compiz. Maybe it's not Adobe's problem after all.