Gnash Project

In recent CVS, Gnash will play YouTube and Lulu TV video flash movies. Although there are still bugs to fix, the basic functionality (i.e., video playback :)) is there.

This is our main criterium for the next Gnash release, so after video playback has stabilised, we will be releasing a new Gnash.

Last night I added OGL support for OS X and fixed some build issues, now it's up 'n running albeit you must start X11 first.

Two approaches to Flash
The free software community has two independent projects working toward the implementation of a free Flash player: Gnash and swfdec. There has been some talk recently about these two projects, their goals, their accomplishments, and whether it makes sense to have them both. In an effort to bring more light to the situation, LWN held a conversation with the principal developers of both projects.

In an interview with Groklaw, Richard Stallman mentions Gnash:

"The popularity of Flash has been a big problem for our community, and we've been urging people not to use Flash for anything. However, we've just about solved that problem and we're soon going to release a version of Gnash which can even handle YouTube."

And we're inching closer to solving this problem every day.

Rob was recently interviewed about Gnash for an article in the 'new technologies' section of a Spanish consumer news site.

The article discusses how flash has become commonplace, and why an open alternative to the Adobe flash player is needed. There is a brief history of Gnash and a mention of its portability. Finally, the author discusses the future of flash on mobile phones.

Thanks to Rob's efforts at CCC, Gnash was ported to OLPC (one laptop per child). They blogged about us at OLPC News.

It's also mentioned here.

Update: There is also this photo of Gnash running as a plugin to the web browser on an OLPC.

Original link

Here's an article with several nice screen shots of a Gnash port to the Haiku OS.

The second alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version 0.7.2. 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.

With Sun's recent announcement that they are planning on freeing Java under the GPL and Adobe's decision to open source the Actionscript Virtual Machine, I thought it would be good to take a look at other open source Rich Internet Application solutions. One of the most famous is Gnash, a GNU Flash movie player. I talked with Rob Savoye, the lead developer on the project, about what Gnash is and what the goals for this implementation for open source Flash are. If you are interested in trying it out, you can download Gnash here, and Rob said a new release is expected very soon.

Fabienne: One and a half weeks ago I spent two days at the second annual O'Reilly EuroOSCON conference in Brussels, Belgium. EuroOSCON topics on Open Source programming range from political to technological. For more of my coverage check out the EuroOSCON tag here on Netscape.