Gnash Project

February 20th, 2008

Posted by Seth Schoen, EFF

The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video (FLV) into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers.

Adobe has launched a website where they apparently wish to host an "open source" community. They apparently mostly use this to host the part of their documentation that's not tained. (Unlike, say, their SWF documentation.)

What is interesting here is also that they appparently run their "BlazeDS" project from this site. As far as I can tell this is a Java project, although its purpose is not known to me. Another notable missing thing is the license under which it is available; although it appears to include several free software bundles, the source document tree doesn't seem to have a license. I have a feeling some of those included bundles are GPL, so with that Adobe would be violating the GPL.

Gnash is now included in the latest release of Yellow Dog Linux.

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Original Link

OVELAND, Colorado - 5 February 2008 - Terra Soft today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a popular derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), YDL v6.0 offers enterprise quality for the home user.

Thanks to gnack.com (a subsidiary of Lulu Enterprises), gnashdev.org is now running on a new dedicated host. Thanks to everyone for their patience these last few weeks while gnashdev shared space with lulu.tv, and thanks to lulu.tv for providing it.

This should eliminate many issues people were having with the wiki. If not, drop me a note and we'll get it fixed.

Offscreen rendering is a desirable instrument for many graphics developers. It's an invaluable debugging tool. Gnash's testsuite has had an infrastructure added for graphics testing quite a long time ago. When I recently rewrote the Cairo renderer, I also added support for off-screen rendering.

Recently, I finished rewriting the OpenGL renderer. In the course of this rewrite, a certain other developer noted at least four times that he would like to see an offscreen rendering ability for the OpenGL renderer. :) Naturally, I agreed.

OpenGL does not provide an offscreen rendering system, so many OpenGL implementations have devised a system of their own. For Mesa, which is the standard free software OpenGL implementation, OSMesa was developed. It follows that my next step was to utilize OSMesa in Gnash. [1]

Ars Technica is running an article on Mirco Müller's talk at FOSSCamp where he suggests that people use OpenGL to make desktop applications richer.

From the article: "Core GTK people haven't decided how they want to approach OpenGL integration yet," said Müller during the session. "It's still in the experimental phase."

This would pose a problem for many developers who, naturally, would want a stable foundation for their user interfaces.

The article also reads: "GTK application developers can use the GTK/GLExt bindings, which are very effective despite not yet being an official part of GTK."

Someone was kind enough to package gnash and make it run on the PS3: http://blogs.ydl.net/billdar/2007/09/12/flash-for-ydl-using-gnash/

Rob Savoye wrote:

"The forth alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.1. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox 1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.

During this week, some one ported gnash to yet another OS, namely 'Syllable'.

Here is a picture of gnash running under Syllable: