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Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com)
Linux.com
looks into the reasons behind the delay of Adobe's Flash 9 player
for Linux.
"Adobe skipped a version of Flash for Linux and released stable versions of the Flash 9 player for Windows and Mac OS X long before the beta of Flash 9 to Linux users. Paul Betlem, senior director of engineering for Adobe, explained why the process is taking so long.
Betlem says that several factors have contributed to the tardiness of Flash on Linux. The primary problem, says Betlem, is the complexity of porting the Flash player to Linux due to differing libraries used for sound, video, and type on different Linux distributions."
(Log in to post comments)
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Nov 30, 2006 20:48 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] I have a possible solution for the problem that is in no way original:
1. Release the source
It seems to me that 99% of the software I have on my (Gentoo) system has no problems with with whatever myriad permutations of versions of libraries and kernels that are available. However, the two pieces of software that I have the most issues with (Nvidia video & Adobe Flash) can mostly be attributed to the fact that the source code is not available.
Free the source. That's how things "work" with Linux.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Nov 30, 2006 21:10 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I second your comment heartily many times over. Unfortunately I have a fairly strong feeling that it will not happen. :-(
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 5:33 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] Probably the best way to make it happen is to support the Gnash GNU Flash player. Either the Gnash project will succeed, or it will get close enough and Adobe might do a Sun :-)
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 8:39 UTC (Fri) by anandsr21 (guest, #28562) [Link] They should have named it GHarmony ;-).
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 18:27 UTC (Fri) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] Unfortunately, there's a problem here. Flash videos (i.e. YouTube, the undeniably most popular flash application these days) are encoded with On's VP6 codec, which is proprietary and patent-protected. Even if Gnash were to implement everything perfectly, they sill wouldn't be able to support YouTube videos, which is a deal breaker for all normal users.
Maybe a hack like the win32 codec loader could be done, allowing a Gnash binary to load a user-installed coded. At least then distributions could install it by default with some hope of being useful. But IMHO a "flash" plugin that doesn't do YouTube is worse than none at all.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 21:16 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] Fortunately there are countries where software patents are still not inforcible...
Btw. mplayer seems to have a native VP6 implementation now.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 22:17 UTC (Fri) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] AFAICT, the mplayer vp6 support is handled by loading the windows DLL, at least in the 1.0pre8 release I have here.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 22:30 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] It seems to have been implemented for 1.0rc1:
$ mplayer -vc help | grep -i vp6
ffvp6 ffmpeg working FFmpeg VP6 decoder [vp6]
I wonder which one the default is...
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 2, 2006 16:39 UTC (Sat) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link] Does it do flash video? (Which uses the same basic H.264 video asquicktime, which involves licensing a patent pool.)
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Nov 30, 2006 21:25 UTC (Thu) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] When you look at the comments on the Linux Flash 9 developer's blog (penguin.swf), it seems clear that this person has more or less no experience developing apps for Linux. Basics such as linking and soname and dlopen seem to be misunderstood.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 3:20 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Yes, a thousand times yes. They don't seem to have anyone on the team familiar with developing software for unix.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 2, 2006 0:24 UTC (Sat) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] That's absolutely false. Mike Melanson was on the Xine development teamfor a long time and also worked on mplayer (IIRC).
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 3, 2006 15:24 UTC (Sun) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] If this is the case, then how can basic issues like library sonames possibly hold them up for weeks as they claimed?
The real news Posted Nov 30, 2006 22:54 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] The real news in that Adobe is "committed" to creating a 64-bit native port of Flash 9. It also plans to release Flash 10 for all platforms at once.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Nov 30, 2006 23:32 UTC (Thu) by quozl (subscriber, #18798) [Link] I imagine that the high rate of change has also contributed to this. We should expect more of this sort of failure of commercial vendors to track change in the Linux distributions.
False expectations?
Most other operating systems tend to provide upward compatibility, new versions leave compatibility APIs behind for older code to keep using. We do this less in the open source community. It keeps us lean and improving, and I like it. But bitrot is more obvious. Releasing the code certainly helps.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 0:07 UTC (Fri) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] It's instructive that Adobe Reader for Linux more or less tracks the Windows and Mac versions. And Adobe Reader is at least as complex a piece of software as Flash Player. Perhaps the difference is developer culture at Adobe versus at Macromedia? After all, Adobe has a long history of developing Unix applications.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 4:57 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If you are not programmer then it can be "obvious" for you that "Adobe Reader is at least as complex a piece of software as Flash Player". And it's even true - to an extent. The Adobe Reader itself is complex, but it's integration with the rest of the system is trivial: it uses intefaces cast in stone 10 years ago (Netscape Navigator 2.x and X11R6 without any extensions), it does not interact much with the rest of teh system and what libraruies it uses it brings in package (check how many libraries are there someday!). Flash can not work this way: it must iteract with sound servers, streaming video extensions and so on. If you'll look at it from integration viewpoint then Flash is 10 times more complex then Adobe Reader! No wonder it takes longer to fix it :(
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 5:48 UTC (Fri) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] That's quite an assertion. Acroread doesn't program X11 to the metal, it uses GTK and Pango. And it also integrates with ATK, GNOME's accessability framework. And, miracle of miracles, it uses OpenGL and ALSA (when reading the document aloud).
ldd acroread
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 5:58 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] In fact, Adobe Reader on Linux lacks a huge feature in the Windows and Mac versions: the ability to embed media. So, for example, you can use latex-beamer and movie15 on linux to create a PDF presentation with an embedded movie, but you can't view it on linux (at least not until kpdf or evince learn to embed movies).
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 12:52 UTC (Fri) by danand (guest, #42001) [Link] All these flash webites are driving a lot of people nuts!
Who want a webpage to take up 20MB of download for a 2kB text message?!
Do we really really need this flash at all?!
( Yes I know I'm an introvert SOB but really... It's like 90% garbage and ads on the web pages nowadays )
I'm sure the advertising peeps can sort out the graphics without resorting to a lot of compatibilty problem creating Flash version XYZ programs...
:(
//Dan
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 13:24 UTC (Fri) by Junior_Samples (guest, #26737) [Link] Thank you, Dan!You're telling it like it is. Flash == unwanted "content". I live my weblife very nicely with out Flash. I wish eliminating commercials on television were as easy.
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 1, 2006 17:01 UTC (Fri) by DRBaldock (subscriber, #30881) [Link] Too true ... usually: Flash == unwanted "content".
As long as FlashBlock [ http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ ] is updated to block any new ads in FireFox, it might be nice to have the latest version available for when I actually _do_ want to see a Flash presentation.
I haven't used it yet, but apparently MythTV has the ability to delete ads out of recorded TV programs. It doesn't work with Live TV, though.
Take Care,
Flash is bad. But... Posted Dec 1, 2006 17:19 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] I used to feel the same way as you. In fact I still don't have Flashenabled by default in my browser, and hate Flash ads. However, there are some sites that make Flash worthwhile, for example: http://www.pandora.com/ http://www.youtube.com/ and http://video.google.com/ http://www.homestarrunner.com/ I watched some Ubuntu demo videos at Google Video to see some of the 3D effects now available on Linux. And I needed Flash to do it.
Flash is bad. But... Posted Dec 1, 2006 18:16 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] Let me add: http://www.comedycentral.com/
Till recently, they used embedded windows media files; it kind of worked with mplayer plugin or konqueror/kaffeine, but was flaky. Now they use flash and it works nicely.
Stewart/Colbert for '08!
Flash is bad. But... Posted Dec 2, 2006 14:58 UTC (Sat) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] Embedded media in web pages has been done for some ten years now, but that functionality took a huge step backwards when Youtube made Flash Video popular. The a/v sync is terrible, even in the Windows version, and the buffering algorithms makes me think of Real Player in the 90s.
Flash is bad. But... Posted Dec 4, 2006 5:10 UTC (Mon) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] One more (at least during the season): http://www.mlb.com/ . Their Gameday Flash app (live, reasonably detailed graphical presentation of Major League Baseball games) is the single best thing I have ever seen done in Flash. It even works in the old Flash 7!
Why Flash 9 for Linux is taking so long (Linux.com) Posted Dec 3, 2006 1:37 UTC (Sun) by dash2 (guest, #11869) [Link] Slightly OT, but the worlds of open source and flash do intersect:http://www.levitated.net/daily/index.html
Article not quite correct Posted Dec 1, 2006 15:06 UTC (Fri) by wilreichert (subscriber, #17680) [Link] You can run their 32-bit flash plugin on a 64-bit firefox courtesy of nspluginwrapper. Works quite well with their current 9 beta release. I initially tried gnash but it seems to have issues with anything more complicated than annoying banners. Unfortunate, I hope the project matures.
Article not quite correct Posted Dec 1, 2006 17:33 UTC (Fri) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link] Unfortunately, nspluginwrapper is of alpha quality and doesn't work for many people. I tried it, and on my machine it either pegs firefox to 100% cpu usage or crashes the browser outright.
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