Package Gnash player and plugin

[free]

It appears that there's no official gplflash package in Debian.

We should find if there are unofficial packages around, or provide one ourselves.

[free]

Postponing to milestone 0.2

[daniel]

We should also consider swfdec as an alternative to GPLFlash. It appears to be part of GStreamer, which we intend to support for proprietary codec playback.

http://www.schleef.org/swfdec/

[Francesco Poli <frx@…>]

The official GPLFlash package is in Debian sid:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/libflash
Maybe you may backport it to sarge...

Otherwise you may consider Swfdec, as already pointed out. This is in sarge, etch and sid.
http://packages.debian.org/stable/source/swfdec0.3

I don't know which one works best, as I haven't yet found the time to give them a try (still no flash player on my systems...).

[daniel]

A problem may be that Flash players have a dependency on patent-encumbered MP3 decoders, if Flash movies have an MP3 soundtrack.

[daniel]

gplflash depends on libmad, which is patent-encumbered. As we are going to use Fluendo's MP3 plugin for gstreamer instead of libmad, we cannot use gplflash. Unfortunately swfdec also depends on libmad at the moment, but at least there is the potential to make it work with the Fluendo plugin. It's also very buggy on x86_64, according to reports from Debian.

[daniel]

See also the new Open Source Flash site: http://www.osflash.org/

[daniel]

Gnash, the GNU Project's Flash player and Firefox plugin, has now been released as an alpha:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/release-0.7.1.txt

Might be the leading candidate for Flash playback now.

[daniel]

There's an alternative approach described here, using a wrapper for proprietary Netscape plugins:

http://www.gibix.net/dokuwiki/en:projects:nspluginwrapper

However I think Gnash is the best long-term solution, even without MP3 playback.

[free@…]

Gnash is now in sid:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/gnash

shall we include it then?

[free@…]

BTW I've just installed mozilla-plugin-gnash on my 64 Studio partition, it seems to work out of the box, although I'm not an expert of flash sites :), so I can't really say

[daniel@…]

The problem with the Debian package is that it is built against patent-encumbered libmad. We need to build the package against gstreamer instead. (Gnash supports three options for sound output, which are libmad, gstreamer, and ffmpeg).

I don't know if the Debian maintainer will agree to include a gstreamer build - called something like gnash-gstreamer I guess - or if we have to create a custom package, with a mozilla plugin that can depend on it.

I suggest we test the Debian package for a while, then look into the build options.

[daniel@…]

Gnash has a number of bugs which make it unsuitable for inclusion in a stable release, at present, including:

* very high cpu usage on complex animations, top shows up to 100% * firefox mouse pointer sometimes vanishes, replaced with a square fuzzy box

Less serious bugs:

* text in flash animations is not anti-aliased * printing from firefox leaves a blank space where the animation is

I will report these bugs upstream to the Gnash project and see what they say.

[daniel@…]

The suggestion in the Gnash bug tracker is to recompile the package using the agg renderer option instead of opengl, as in the Debian package. This may solve the high CPU use and text anti-aliasing problems.

Since we need to rebuild with gstreamer support instead of libmad, we could do that at the same time.

[free@…]

And waht about swf-player? It seems to use gstreamer now:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/swf-player

[daniel@…]

It seems the swfdec project has become active again, and they now have some initial support for Flash video. Weirdly, it appears to use libmad for MP3 decoding instead of gstreamer's own MP3 support.

I think we should build gnash with the agg renderer support, disabling libmad and enabling gstreamer, then see how swfdec compares to that.

[free@…]

I've successfully built gnash with agg support, but before uploading the package for testing please would somebody paste here a few web addresses of flash sites I could use for a quick for test? Unfortunately I'm no Flash-sites visitor!

[free@…]

I've opened some of the sites linked at

http://www.chooseindia.com/coolflashsites.html

(thanks Quentin!) with both versions of gnash (OpenGL and Agg), and I don't see any significant difference in CPU usage, there are still some sites with provokes high (aroud 80%) load.

The overall experience is not that bad (the quality of the rendering seems acceptable), but also not that good (there are site which are not displayed at all).

[free@…]

Note that I was using a very recent CVS snapshot of Gnash (0.7.2+cvs20070428), as recommended upstream.

[daniel@…]

I'd be glad to try the new build of the plugin, but I think 80% CPU load for a browser plugin is way too high. Unfortunately it seems that Gnash is still in alpha, so we still don't have a native Flash plugin that works reliably. Let's postpone this to the 3.0 release, and see if the situation has improved by then.

[free@…]

You need these three packages:

http://people.64studio.com/~free/gnash_0.7.2+cvs20070428.1515-1_amd64.deb http://people.64studio.com/~free/libgnash0_0.7.2+cvs20070428.1515-1_amd64.deb http://people.64studio.com/~free/mozilla-plugin-gnash_0.7.2+cvs20070428.1515-1_amd64.deb

they've been built with the Agg renderer.

[daniel@…]

Tested Gnash 0.8.1 with the agg renderer - works with YouTube?, doesn't work with the MySpace? embedded music player or MySpace? videos. There's already a ticket open in the Gnash bug tracker for MySpace? support.