Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
A free Flash viewer is one of the last major gaps in GNU/Linux desktop functionality, so last week's news that Gnash, the free Flash player, had reached the stage where it could play YouTube and Lulu.tv videos seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was."
Posted Jun 22, 2007 16:37 UTC (Fri)
by emk (subscriber, #1128)
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Posted Jun 25, 2007 8:20 UTC (Mon)
by irios (guest, #19838)
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It is oustanding how far Moonlight has gone towards Microsoft's Silverlight compatibility in just a few weeks, compared to how little has been achieved in years of work in Flash with no specs. After Monlight's 21 days hackathon, I suspect Adobe have got a queasy feeling now, and wouldn't be surprised if full Flash specs are released in a matter of weeks. Or else, the tide might start turning towards Silverlight, which is a lot less proprietary than Flash, even while coming from Microsoft.
Posted Jun 28, 2007 22:25 UTC (Thu)
by Tet (guest, #5433)
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Posted Jun 29, 2007 5:28 UTC (Fri)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
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Posted Jun 29, 2007 13:04 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Posted Jun 22, 2007 17:51 UTC (Fri)
by jwb (guest, #15467)
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Posted Jun 23, 2007 18:58 UTC (Sat)
by AJWM (guest, #15888)
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Until a new app or library becomes at least barely usable, only a very few die-hards with the vision are willing to put effort into it. Once it reaches the point where the more casual user (for that particular app, but still an experienced programmer) is willing to give it a try, the "many eyes makes bugs shallow" effect starts to take over, and that accelerates as the app becomes usable to more and more people.
At that point the progress rate also depends on the complexity of the app and how well the code is structured and documented to make it easily understandable/modifiable by programmers new to the project.
(And sometimes that's the difference between an ugly hack that does something an end user/programmer wants done but he's not willing to pass back upstream, and a clean one that he is. Case in point, mplayer, which I wanted to display the file name playing as the title of the window it's playing in. Couldn't quickly (ie, within a half-hour or so) figure out the "right" way to do it, so I did an ugly hack with a global variable. Works for my needs but may well not work in other situations.)
Posted Jul 24, 2007 19:42 UTC (Tue)
by kreutzm (guest, #4700)
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Posted Jun 23, 2007 22:54 UTC (Sat)
by endecotp (guest, #36428)
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Or, when an application reaches a level of functionality that meets its author's essential needs, development stops. Or maybe that's just my projects :-(
Posted Jun 24, 2007 1:41 UTC (Sun)
by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)
[Link] (2 responses)
When it no longer hurts I'll keep it installed.
Posted Jun 30, 2007 11:46 UTC (Sat)
by oak (guest, #2786)
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With what SWF file/video it did this? Did you Valgrind/Massif where the
Posted Jul 1, 2007 9:54 UTC (Sun)
by njs (subscriber, #40338)
[Link]
It's not really clear where one would start debugging. I guess putting the URL into argv[1] so it was visible in ps might help.
Some things worth noting: (1) Gnash is incredibly sensitive to how you build it. Choose the wrong audio or video subsystems, and YouTube performance decreases sharply. (2) As of a month and half ago, YouTube video playback was failing largely because of GStreamer-related problems. In particular, buffer underruns killed it. There were also quite a few problems with the controls at the bottom of the movie. But realistically, Gnash should be usable quite soon--I expect something reasonable by the end of the year.Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
I don't think Gnash will get too far until Adobe releases the specs for Flash, but then I think that won't take very long to happen.Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
Why do you claim Adobe haven't released the specs? I downloaded and read them from the Macromedia web site many years ago. Now it may be true that some of the newer functionality isn't publicly documented (I haven't checked). But certainly that basic Flash specs have been available for a *long* time.Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
Did you carefully read the EULA you said "I agree" to before you were able to download the specs? The Gnash developers can't use those documents, and anyone who has can't be a Gnash developer. You basically have to agree not to use the specs to develop a competing interpretation.
Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
Sounds like someone should agree to them, read the Adobe specs, write another spec, and send it to the gnash folks :) classic cleanroom stuff.Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
The incredible thing is that it works at all. If experience with Free Software is any guide, when an application reaches this level of functionality -- that is, barely working for a substantial fraction of users -- it rapidly improves as testing and patching accelerate. I predict gnash will be in good shape by the end of this year.Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
Good observation, and I'd agree. Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
Could you post your mplayer hack? I miss this functionality as well. Thanks.Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
> If experience with Free Software is any guide, when an application reachesRumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
> this level of functionality -- that is, barely working for a substantial
> fraction of users -- it rapidly improves as testing and patching
> accelerate.
Unfortunately it needs to stop eating CPU and memory before people can really start testing it and leaving it enabled. I tried it, and was shocked to see it vying with Evolution to see which could claim the largest virtual memory size -- Evolution won, with over half a gigabyte, but gnash wasn't far behind. I removed it again.
Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
> Unfortunately it needs to stop eating CPU and memory before people can Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)
really start testing it and leaving it enabled.
memory went? Did you file a bug about this?
I see the same thing -- mostly it manifests as "I notice my computer seems weirdly slow, and then discover it's because I have a bunch of gnash processes chewing up resources". So all I know is that it was spawned by some web page that I visited recently, that had a plugin buried in it somewhere, and no guarantee that the web page is still around, or that I ever scrolled down far enough into it that the plugin was even visible on my screen, even assuming I would notice the little black box it made...Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated (Linux.com)