LWN: Comments on "Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)"

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

josh — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:37:52 +0000

Personally, I still just use youtube-dl for youtube videos; as an added bonus, I also never have to deal with choppy video due to poor streaming. youtube-dl -b -t '<paste youtube URL here>' downloads a video, or a whole playlist. "get-flash-videos" works surprisingly well for most other sites, as do various bookmarklets for sites that dig out the video URLs. Apart from video of various kinds, I almost never run into flash content I care about; the few times I have, I either try gnash (which works fairly often), try another site, or just not bother at all.

I don't find it particularly problematic to not have Flash on my system. I don't claim that everyone will find it as unnecessary as I do, just that I manage to do without it and not miss it.

I do, however, look forward to WebM more-or-less eliminating the need for Flash on video sites in the not-too-distant future, hopefully making it increasingly difficult for other sites to count on Flash.

Youtube

elanthis — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:20:19 +0000

It would not be too terribly difficult to do. The trick really just lies in how the server integrates with the ad display, which can be as simple as streaming an ad without seek support before the video itself, or as complex as using AJAX calls regarding ad display time, mouse behaviour, and clicks back to the server for usage pattern verification before streaming videos. Truly savvy users could get around having to see the ads but not get around necessary pauses and wait time before the video plays, which pretty much negates any reason to block the ads in the first place.

Youtube

paulj — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:53:41 +0000

I'm using Tom Callaway's builds of Chromium for Fedora, which are patched to use the system FFmpeg (not Chromiums private copy of it), and it all EWORKSFORME.

Youtube

mikachu — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:37:29 +0000

I was surprised a few months ago when someone mentioned ads overlayed on youtube videos; it turned out I have blocked *.doubleclick.net in my dns and that stops youtube ads completely. Hopefully this will still work with html5 ;).

Youtube

kenmoffat — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:06:38 +0000

Ah, I tried chromium, but it did nothing for html5. Looks as if I need to run it with --enable-extensions, but youtube still tells me my browser doesn't recognise any of the available video formats. Any links to those extensions ? (google is "unhelpful" for this). Thanks

Youtube

mjr — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:50:49 +0000

Overlays (eg. ads) are not exactly a problem to insert onto html5 video via canvas and/or svg. Probably easier to filter on the browser end, though, as the ads would be inserted by the browser itself and not a third-party binary blob interpreting another.

Generally, forcing something using open technologies doesn't work for savvy circumventers; I don't think that's a major problem for the ad business though since most people don't bother to block ads anyway.

Anyway, see http://ajaxian.com/archives/dynamic-content-injection-wit... for a video overlay sample.

Youtube

paulj — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:27:04 +0000

Youtube have had a HTML video beta player since quite a while before WebM, using H.264. See youtube.com/html5. It falls back to the Flash player for ads and for content that is "protected" (cause Flash SWF verification obviously is highly secure).

There's an extension for Chromium which tries to detect embedded flash videos and automatically replace them with an embedded HTML video version, for supported video sites (e.g. Yt). There's another extension which gives you an easy way to visit the Yt page for any embedded flash videos from Yt. They're called "Video5" and "YouTube Video Kit". Very useful.

Vimeo also has HTML video player now.. Dailymotion does too, but availability seems to be very spotty.

Youtube

cowsandmilk — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:00:25 +0000

any video without ads is currently left out of the html5 beta. It will be interesting to see if they can find a way to have ads work with the video tag.... whether it is through a change in the nature of the ads or a technical solution.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

cesarb — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:58:48 +0000

The Lightspark announcement (http://lwn.net/Articles/388054/) mentioned Gnash only works with older versions of the flash scripting language. Youtube probably just upgraded to a more recent version of the language.

Youtube

tialaramex — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:25:19 +0000

But, Youtube is offering WebM + HTML5, so you won't need the Flash applet to play Youtube videos any more once most videos migrate and you get a newer web browser that plays WebM HTML5 videos. Give it six months.

You can expect most web video to follow, although embedded videos in random third party sites might be flash for a few years yet.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

kenmoffat — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:10:22 +0000

What's really sad is that last year, perhaps 9 months ago, youtube mostly worked in x86_64 gnash if you had the dependencies for the various gstreamer plugins (I found a few things that didn't render, but had sound, but most that I was interested in worked well enough). And then youtube changed something again, and gnash stopped working.

And there was me thinking that 'do no evil' applied to youtube.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

sjj — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:55:53 +0000

I was in the same boat, and decided to retry 32 bit flash rather than keep running the vulnerable 64 bit version. Something must have gotten fixed in F12 (and F13) along the way, since it works for me now following instructions at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash .

Yes, tried gnash, couldn't play youtube.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

jmorris42 — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:16:07 +0000

> Not that the correct solution is to remove vulnerable software -- it should be fixed.

Exactly. I had problems getting flash working on F12, found the 64 bit beta and it worked for me. In fact, except for some interaction between it and compiz causing full screen mode not to work I have had no problems at all with the beta. Now I'm left with four increasingly bad options.

1. Do nothing and hope a widespread public exploit doesn't happen based on the low installed base for a beta only made available on Linux.

2. Spend another afternoon (or more) trying to figure out why the 32bit one + nspluginwrapper didn't work.

3. Try to install the free player that is known to not work on much actual content live in the wild.

4. Say 'screw it'; Remove Flash and break most of the Internet that is overly dependent on the crap.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

clump — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:03:20 +0000

As cynical as I am, this could be a poorly communicated attempt at removing a vulnerable version of software. Not that the correct solution is to remove vulnerable software -- it should be fixed.

Of course without source code, we're left to speculate. And this is particularly dangerous software to be so ubiquitous without source code.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

jengelh — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:46:32 +0000

And a good one on why it has to die.

Adobe pulls Flash player for 64 bit linux (TechWorld)

bronson — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:18:20 +0000

Adobe is doing a poor job of reminding people why Flash should continue to live.