Add gnash plugin for the web activity to play flash files

[sj]

Add gnash plugin to the web activity so it can display simple flash files. Gnash-gtk has been made to work from the command line; this is the next step.

Should be assigned to Rob Savoye.

[jg]

Is gnash-gtk packaged and ready to go?

Similarly, we'll need some easy way to swap this out for the Adobe commercial player, as we know there will be content out there that countries will need to access for which Gnash isn't yet capable enough to play.

Rob will need to register with Trac before we can assign it to him.

[dhopkins]

Gnash is great!

Please do whatever you can to support the development of Gnash, so it becomes fully compatible with the Adobe Flash player, and capable of running all Flash and OpenLaszlo applications.

Extending Gnash and/or supporting Adobe Flash will enable the use the open source OpenLaszlo programming language (http://www.openlaszlo.org) to develop rich web applications that run in Flash/Gnash player, as well as DHTML/JavaScript/AJAX in web browser.

Long term goal: Integrate Gnash with Adobe's recently open source (and very efficient) AVM2 ActionScript virtual machine (which has a just in time compiler). It is slated to be integrated with Firefox (in the long term), and will drastically improve the performance of JavaScript and AJAX applications.

AVM2 is a much better JavaScript VM than the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine currently in Firefox. SpiderMonkey is extremely inefficient in terms of speed and memory: it's both the slowest AND the fattest scripting language, by a factor of two times slower and fatter than the next-worse, according to the Computer Langauge Shoot Out.

[joaoboscoapf]

I sucessfully installed the flash player plugin 9 for the web browser. Instructions:

• Open a terminal as root
• Download the plugin file:

   wget  http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
  

• Unpack it:

   tar xzvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
  

• Run the flashplayer-installer and follow instructions (the install folder is /usr/lib/xulrunner-XXXXX/):

   ./flashplayer-installer
  

[rsavoye]

Current Gnash CVS builds fine for the OLPC if you use a GTK gui with the AGG backend. Configure with --enable-renderer=agg when configuring. As of 01/25/07, Gnash works fine as a Flash plugin for the web activity. There is currently a related bug that MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH needs to be set so it find it's plugins.

[rsavoye]

Replying to dhopkins:

Gnash is great! Please do whatever you can to support the development of Gnash, so it becomes fully compatible with the Adobe Flash player, and capable of running all Flash and OpenLaszlo applications. Extending Gnash and/or supporting Adobe Flash will enable the use the open source OpenLaszlo programming language (http://www.openlaszlo.org) to develop rich web applications that run in Flash/Gnash player, as well as DHTML/JavaScript/AJAX in web browser. Long term goal: Integrate Gnash with Adobe's recently open source (and very efficient) AVM2 ActionScript virtual machine (which has a just in time compiler). It is slated to be integrated with Firefox (in the long term), and will drastically improve the performance of JavaScript and AJAX applications. AVM2 is a much better JavaScript VM than the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine currently in Firefox. SpiderMonkey is extremely inefficient in terms of speed and memory: it's both the slowest AND the fattest scripting language, by a factor of two times slower and fatter than the next-worse, according to the Computer Langauge Shoot Out.

Actually Gnash's ActionScript VM is already pretty good, and we'd already implemented the few classes in the Tamarin release when that came out. Tamarin is actually less than 10% of the code you'd need for a Flash player.

[rsavoye]

Replying to jg:

Is gnash-gtk packaged and ready to go? Similarly, we'll need some easy way to swap this out for the Adobe commercial player, as we know there will be content out there that countries will need to access for which Gnash isn't yet capable enough to play.

The Adobe Flash plugin is a single .so file, swapping it with the Gnash Flash plugin would be easy.

Rob will need to register with Trac before we can assign it to him.

Done.

[jg]

Rob, could you get J5 a Gnash package for inclusion? Walter wants that first (before the commercial player), as leverage.

We should relnote that both gnash and the Adobe player work.

[rsavoye]

Replying to jg:

Is gnash-gtk packaged and ready to go?

I have a snapshot at http://gnash.lulu.com/olpc/. The tarball is from CVS, with embedded FLV video support and sound support. This needs to be installed, as the browser plugin uses the standalone Gnash player. Then copy the .so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. The snapshot assumes its installed in /usr/local/olpc, although there are no hardcoded paths, so you can put it anywhere.

Currently Gnash builds fine from CVS for the OLPC, so you can do you own build if need be, or I can do another one after I get back from FOSDEM 2007.

Similarly, we'll need some easy way to swap this out for the Adobe commercial player, as we know there will be content out there that countries will need to access for which Gnash isn't yet capable enough to play.

That would be trivial, just swap the shared library in the plugins directory.

[rsavoye]

Replying to jg:

Is gnash-gtk packaged and ready to go? Similarly, we'll need some easy way to swap this out for the Adobe commercial player, as we know there will be content out there that countries will need to access for which Gnash isn't yet capable enough to play. Rob will need to register with Trac before we can assign it to him.

Packages built by John Palmieri at Redhat are at:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/projects/olpc/development/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/ This will be in build 291. This is a shapshot of Gnash and the plugin as of March 6, 2007.

[marco]

I think this has been added. Closing. (Please reopen if I am mistake)