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Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com)
internetnews.com
looks into development issues with Adobe's Flash Player 9 for Linux.
""In general we chose the standard but we really just want it to work," Huang said. "Our wish list is for more consistency of libraries across the various Linux distributions, which would enable wider support."
The problem revolves around the fact that there really isn't such a thing a standard Linux desktop. Efforts like the Linux Standard Base (LSB), which aims to provide standardized API's for the Linux desktop, fall short for Flash."
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It only sounds like a problem Posted Feb 15, 2007 20:37 UTC (Thu) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] If they'll just release the format specification for Flash 9, we can takethis problem right out of their hands.
It only sounds like a problem Posted Feb 15, 2007 20:38 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (guest, #18) [Link] Not quite. There's at least one patent-covered codec involved, so that'd have to be solved too.
It only sounds like a problem Posted Feb 15, 2007 21:18 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] with full API specs for the codec, it could be wrapped by opensource code (and run in qemu on non x86 platforms as needed) but the codec itself could be distributed per the patent restrictions.
It only sounds like a problem Posted Feb 16, 2007 0:48 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Having a patent on a codec doesn't preclude it being 'open source'.
It just makes redistribution and use in other programs very troubling. It would be open source, non-free software.
Besides which we have a Free software codec support that will be able to replace what Adobe can't legally 'Free' themselves.
It only sounds like a problem Posted Feb 15, 2007 21:25 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] We've got a solution for that - not having software patents.Just because something's not useful in the US doesn't mean it's not useful.
It only sounds like a problem Posted Feb 15, 2007 21:28 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (guest, #18) [Link] Oh, don't worry, it'll be a problem wherever you are soon enough, and likely before it goes away in the US. The money's on the wrong side of this fight.
Still a US problem Posted Feb 20, 2007 8:48 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Let's hope not. It's in our hands to make something, and there's money on both sides of the table.
all codecs are covered by patents Posted Feb 16, 2007 1:48 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link] All (useful) video codecs are covered by patents (yes, even Theora) yet this has never been a hindrance to open source implementations.
theora and patents Posted Feb 16, 2007 5:29 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] As I understand it, the patents that cover Theora have been donated with a free license by On2, their owner. If you believe otherwise, please point to some evidence.
theora and patents Posted Feb 16, 2007 5:47 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] The people that created VP3 donated their patents that they've received so that we can have Theora.
That is not to say that they have donated ALL patents, because they do not own all of them that cover VP3. There is a lot of things that Theora do that mpeg4 codecs do and the mpeg4 folks charge money for.
I don't have proof about this as I don't understand the math behind encoding and such. But If you search through the ffmpeg mailing lists you can find people responding to this question time to time.
My limited understanding is that people on the ffmpeg lists say that Theora is infinging against a number of patents (not owned by On2), but so is everybody else. Also the patents are invalid due to prior art and all that.
I am not a lawyer but it seems safest just to ignore it and assume Theora is safe. But also not to be scared of shipping other codecs support coming out of places like ffmpeg, just as long as your able to quickly respond if there is a problem.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 0:31 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] "[...]we really just want it to work."
Oh really? Just not on amd64, or powerpc, or when the charset isn't UTF_8. And so on.
It's impressive to me how vastly more complex pieces of code were ported to Linux in far less time and managed to cover all arches. We all know the reasons behind this failure, but I think continuing to point it out is worth doing.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 1:32 UTC (Fri) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link] We all know the reasons behind this failure, ...Please list the reasons that you claim we all know.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 1:53 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] My guess would be:"It's propriatory software"
If it was open source/free software then every distribution would support it out of the box and it would more then likely support PowerPC, Sparc, Arm and whatever else people care to use it with.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 3:10 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Yes my list was basically proprietary, and then some stranglehold dreams and brain damage which lead to this being the case. The dream of owning the platform. Everyone wants to be Microsoft.
Sure, you can succeed by inventing the platform and making all the best tools for it, but that would cause your company to stay focused and keep quality up. It's much easier to claim openness while creating roadblocks. That way you can lose focus and drift from your moorings.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 7:17 UTC (Fri) by odie (guest, #738) [Link] The article is very light on details. What exactly was failing them? The only specific example they mention is that they had a hard time choosing between GTK and Qt. Surely, both of these libraries are fully supported on every one of their target distributions? Having a choice here should be a good thing, they can pick whichever toolkit fits in with their needs and methodology.
It's good to hear that they submitted their complaints to the LSB folks, but it would have been interesting for the entire Linux community to know what hurdles they encountered. I can't be the only one left confused by their explanation.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 20:30 UTC (Fri) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] Yes, and even so, couldn't they just pick one GUI toolkit and publish Flash statically linked to it? Isn't that what they already do for Acrobat Reader?
There was an article earlier on how they were taking time trying to decide between audio standards (est, arts, oss, alsa, etc.). My understanding is that the big 2 DE's are both using Gstreamer.. why not write to Gstreamer? Seems like other commercial distributers are doing that and I don't see many complaints from them.
I think this is more of a case of poor management and very little to do with technology.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 22:26 UTC (Fri) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link] Yes, and even so, couldn't they just pick one GUI toolkit and publish Flash statically linked to it?I can't speak to Adobe's practices, but from what I heard in the past one of the lead business requirements for the Flash player (on its primary platforms) in the Macromedia days was that the download size be kept as small as possible. Linking in one toolkit or the other would, I imagine, not be conducive to meeting that requirement.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 17, 2007 5:48 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Kicking the dead horse here: An open source flash player would be already installed, making it a 0k download.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 8:26 UTC (Fri) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] Flash just sucks.
The only good thing about Flash is, that one can filter it away in the web proxy easily.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 11:33 UTC (Fri) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] I agree about 95%. The 5% is that flash has, mysteriously, now become the de-facto web video standard. Does anyone know why that is? If you were a web site designer having to select a video format, what would lead you towards Flash and away from the alternatives? We need to understand why it is preferred so that we can make the freer alternatives more appealing to the potential users.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 11:56 UTC (Fri) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] Think it's partly because of youtube and google video using it,and that you're done on the client when you install a flash plugin, which is less problematic than local videoplayers, with their codec hell, used in embedded streams, with their horrible javascript mess protecting/helping it on most sites.
They could ofcourse also agree on a simple self invented standard there, say xvid or theora and some simplified standardized embedding wrapper glue everyone can use, and make a small multiplatform oss plugin for it, but then the problem is to get people to install it, people who already have adopted flash now, will not want to take an extra step.
Maybe that new stuff the BBC comes up with will give online video a boost.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 12:27 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] Isn't that rather sidestepping the question - why did google and youtube choose it? Perhaps the answer is the rest of the para (which I admit to not fully understanding): i.e. 'less problematic than local videoplayers'.
How is the GNU flash project coming along? Not being able to follow youtube or google video links _is_ annoying. But x86-only solutions are completely useless to me.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 12:42 UTC (Fri) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] In fact, I have no problem with Flash video (.flv), which is displayed by mplayer nicely. Not in the browser window, but if one sends me a youtube link, I use youtube-dl anyway.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 14:23 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Isn't that rather sidestepping the question - why did google and youtube choose it? Google Video used modified version of VLC initially. They switched to Flash later. And the reason is obvious: Flash is already installed on millions of desktops, any other plugin must be installed manually. End of story. Flash won. The fate of any other player will be the same. Of course it can be good idea to offer something other as "premium" content (better quality, for example), but here the patents are big problem...
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 17:57 UTC (Fri) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] > Flash is already installed on millions of desktops, any other plugin> must be installed manually.
I feared that this was the case but wasn't sure.
Perhaps if Mozilla could be persuaded to ship with MPEG support built in, that would help a bit. Are there any major technical, legal or other obstacles to that?
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 20, 2007 1:07 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Well, MPEG is heavily patented in a number of regions. So Mozilla.org would either have to risk being sued or pay a per-unit royalty for each browser they distribute. Not really feasible.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 17, 2007 5:53 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] The platforms took too long to deploy friendly, well working, universally installed browser plugins for video formats.
You can blame this largely on turf wars over formats, patents, imprecise specifications and so on. Macromedia/Adobe, who was getting their little bundle of binaries installed pretty much everywhere somehow (by default? not sure, but certainly it shows up on most web-enabled computers), added a video format and provided a way to create "reliable" user interfaces for it. When I say "reliable" I mean that the interface can be expected to be the same on the computers on which it works at all, which some people value (I do not).
In short, Microsoft, Apple, Real and others all failed due to stupidity and roadblocks, and Macromedia/Adobe succeeded by setting the bar a bit lower.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 20:51 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link] I never had any problem just clicking the 'download' button in Google Video and playing the resulting avi in xine/mplayer.
Is that avi a flash video? Somehow I doubt it.
I know youtube uses flash, in youtube I have to use Video Downloader and the resulting file is a flv file (which mplayer plays perfectly by the way, probably illegally where software patents are an issue). But flv is a horrible movie format, both in quality and functionality.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 17, 2007 6:00 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] Google video's primary interface at this time is FLV (VP6??) served via flash methods played by the flash video player with flash interface.
They have, as you say, always provided AVI enclosed files (the files identify themselves as encoded by XVID) which are superior in bandwidth, quality, and cpu overhead. However, this is a minority feature. Some videos have it turned off (???) and it's labelled "download", and most people just watch the video in flash "without downloading". (Yes, I know obviously streaming and downloading are the same thing but users and media companies seem intent on pretending otherwise.)
I'm not sure how Google stores the files internally, and whether it converts once or on the fly.
I would, btw, not describe mplayer's flv playback as "perfect". It's certainly adequate though.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 14:09 UTC (Fri) by ipes (guest, #43384) [Link] If you want your browser to play this 5% and ignore the rest, it's even easier than using a web proxy. Just tell your browser to use an MPlayer based plugin for the flash mime type. For Konqueror that plugin would be KPlayer (or KMPlayer), for Firefox there's mplayerplug-in.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 18:12 UTC (Fri) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] > Just tell your browser to use an MPlayer based plugin for the> flash mime type
Thanks for that suggestion. I do have the mplayer plugin but have never experimented with the mime type association stuff. I have, however, tried using the Firefox "VideoDownloader" extension to grab the videos and to play them with mplayer. I've been about 50% successful with this, with mplayer failing mysteriously the rest of the time. This "VideoDownloader" thing also has the surprising feature of "phoning home" to tell its creator what you are downloading, which seems odd for something distributed from addons.mozilla.org.
More fundamentally, however, I believe this requires that you install binary windows codecs. I know that these a fairly widely available, but I'm unsure of the legality of them, and they are utterly useless for non-x86.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 16, 2007 22:00 UTC (Fri) by ipes (guest, #43384) [Link] "The highlights of this release are native VC-1/WMV3, On2 VP5 and VP62 (used in some Flash video files) decoding, which works even on non-Intel platforms..."
That from MPlayer 1.0rc1 release announcement last October.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 17, 2007 6:03 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] I have tried VideoDownloader, and recommend against using it. It is not very reliable, and has a somewhat clunky interface. I've had it crash firefox, I've had it break during upgrades.
I'm quite happy with youtube-dl, a python script which just downloads the flv files to the current directory. It takes any sort of semi-appropriate youtube url as an argument. http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 20, 2007 8:07 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link] Even easier, my yousuck-script is just one line (splitted for your reading pleasure):
wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4)" \
web video standard Posted Feb 16, 2007 14:19 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] Because 90-95% of the web users have Flash or can get it easily. That can't be said forany other web video formats. Remember the days of "click here for the WMV if you have Windows, and click here for the QuickTime (with patented/proprietary codec) if you have a Mac" ?
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users Posted Feb 24, 2007 0:01 UTC (Sat) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link] Your comment that you cannot use flash because there are no amd64 binaries is not entirely true. It is possible to use the x86 binary flash binary on an amd64 kernel, even on an amd64 firefox, provided that you have the right wrappers and multilib support. Sure, a native amd64 version would be preferable.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers Posted Feb 16, 2007 14:21 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] "Ward argued that all Flash design is done on either Windows or Mac."You think maybe that's because all Flash design tools run only on either Windows or Mac?
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers Posted Feb 16, 2007 20:36 UTC (Fri) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] ... because (flash) designers only know Windows or Mac.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers Posted Feb 17, 2007 13:39 UTC (Sat) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link] Exactly.
My preference is a Linux desktop...
I dual boot-- why? When I need to do Flash development. :-/
Having a native port of Flash 8 Pro would ensure I didn't need Windows.
Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com) Posted Feb 16, 2007 18:22 UTC (Fri) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] Ummm,
"The problem revolves around the fact that there really isn't such a thing a standard Linux desktop. "
Err, No.
The problem is flash.
The End.
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