Submitted by “Here it is, at last. Gnash 0.8.1 no longer segfaults on FreeBSD, I’ve solved all configure problems, all dependencies are checked, all test builds completed successfully. Behold, native Flash player for FreeBSD. It seems like I’m the first to try it, so why not do some tests while the port is being committed? I wonder, can I play flash games now? Can I be see those shiny flash banners? Can I watch YouTube videos at last?”
I didn’t do any research on how this was accomplished. Flash is not “open” so this was reverse engineered? What version of flash compatibility are they shooting for?
“Flash is not “open” so this was reverse engineered? ”
There is a Flash spec out there. For instance, in OpenOffice, you can export Presentations to a Flash file.
Implementing the spec is easier said than done, I imagine. Radeon finally released the specs for their graphics cards, and it’s several hundred pages long.
>There is a Flash spec out there. For instance, in OpenOffice, you can export Presentations to a Flash file.
The problem is that this spec doesn’t allow you to create a flash player, only to export files to SWF format.
http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileformat/faq/#item-1-8
Ouch!
Or rather, the licence to the spec doesn’t allow you to make a flash player.
I also wonder about the legal state of Flash. I know ActionScript is an ECMAScript implementation, so maybe that’s a standard free of patents, but other parts of flash are under patents, AFAIK.
So I wonder if Gnash will be in the same situation as ffmpeg, x264, libmad, etc… which are all FOSS but still can’t be distributed by mainstream distributions because of patents.
Anyone know about it?
>What version of flash compatibility are they shooting for?
For now, flash 7.
I found this review very interesting and thorough, and the author did check the things that matter the most. Even though I use Linux I found lots of useful info as to where Gnash stands now.
<sarcasm>Gnash in FreeBSD. But it’s a GNU project released under the GPL. Oh, no, can’t have that.</sarcasm>
It’s good to see that people can see beyond the nonsensical bullshit debates that often arise here. Both the BSD and the GPL are both copyleft licenses,even if the GPL makes it easier and more likely for all branches of the same tree to continue being developed under the same license into the future.
Edited 2007-09-19 01:06
BSD is not a “copyleft” license. Look up the term. Kirk McKusick used to joke that it was a “copycenter” license: take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.
Whats so news worthy about someone getting their FreeBSD port to build and run properly?
It’s information worthy because of the in-depth information about Gnash. You’ll get this information if you’re following the link.
I think many of us dislike flash and look forward to a respectable, FOSS player for times it is really needed.
Thanks for the review.
When will this get put into the ports tree?
This really sounds promising. I didn’t really expect them to get this far. I hope this takes off, so alternative OSes can properly integrate flash in their default installations.
It’s a bit strange though how this guy talks about the de-synch’ed sound. No matter how fast your CPU and graphics card are, and how much RAM you have, there is inevitably some flash media that will stutter. Keeping the sound synchronized despite stuttering is definitely a must-have!