Gnash

After reading yet another blog post from a Debian user about why Gnash sucks, I need to rant. The problem is very simple, Debian has been shipping an ancient release of Gnash that was so old, very little worked with it anymore. This was due to ... [More] several factors, but the end result was nobody was happy. I tried to work around this problem by building frequent snapshots as deb packages for Lenny on x86, amd64, and mipsel, which one can get from out own Gnash Debian repository But most people never knew about this repository, so after a few seconds of staring at a blank window, they'd quickly drop Gnash and install the Adobe plugin. So much for being supporters of free software... read more [Less]

After reading yet another blog post from a Debian user about why Gnash sucks, I need to rant. The problem is very simple, Debian has been shipping an ancient release of Gnash that was so old, very little worked with it anymore. This was due to ... [More] several factors, but the end result was nobody was happy. I tried to work around this problem by building frequent snapshots as deb packages for Lenny on x86, amd64, and mipsel, which one can get from out own Gnash Debian repository But most people never knew about this repository, so after a few seconds of staring at a blank window, they'd quickly drop Gnash and install the Adobe plugin. So much for being supporters of free software... read more [Less]

So the Gnash team is broke, and has been for most of a year. This has forced many, but not all of the Gnash developers to find paying work, and mostly stop working on Gnash. The few of us left focused on Gnash like to eat and pay bills. We get a lot ... [More] of bitching about lack of comparability on some web sites, but we won't get more compatible without your help. And the way you can help is to contribute funding. There is a list of tasks on the Gnash wiki we'd appreciate some support for. Please think what it costs an experienced developer to live at bare survival level. Most of us have families, and they're all getting a bit burned out by our support of free software to the point of long hours of work for no compensation. read more [Less]

So the Gnash team is broke, and has been for most of a year. This has forced many, but not all of the Gnash developers to find paying work, and mostly stop working on Gnash. The few of us left focused on Gnash like to eat and pay bills. We get a lot ... [More] of bitching about lack of compatibility on some web sites, but we won't get more compatible without your help. And the way you can help is to contribute funding. There is a list of tasks on the Gnash wiki we'd appreciate some support for. Please think what it costs an experienced developer to live at bare survival level. Most of us have families, and they're all getting a bit burned out by our support of free software to the point of long hours of work for no compensation. read more [Less]

Gnash features in the Safe Surfing CD distributed free by the German Computer BILD magazine. The safety organization TÜV Rheinland and the Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) were involved in the CD's development.

Gnash is now completely compilable and optimizable with the LLVM frontend Clang. The AGG renderer headers have one C++ bug that causes an error. This needs to be fixed externally if you want to use that renderer, as it seems legitimate for a compiler ... [More] to reject it (even if GCC doesn't). Clang has already helped to find a few bugs in Gnash. Some warnings picked up things that GCC missed. And most interestingly, there were cases where Gnash's behaviour was relying on the order of evaluating function arguments. read more [Less]

Now Gnash is part Adobe Flash's rich developer ecosystem ... The page, "the Truth about Flash", claims: Finally, the Flash Platform has a rich developer ecosystem of both open and proprietary tools and technologies, including developer IDEs and ... [More] environments such as FDT, IntelliJ, and haXe; open source runtimes such as Gnash; and open source video servers such as Red5. [2010-05-17] read more [Less]

See a YouTube video of Gnash running on a cortex-A8 board (courtesy of Daniel Amor Martin).

The news that the BBC has started "encrypting" its RTMP streams came, in one of those coincidences, just as I'd decided to work on adding RTMP support to Gnash. So even when Gnash's RTMP video streaming works, it will still be legally difficult, if ... [More] not impossible, for licence fee payers who care about software freedom to use the BBC's iPlayer. read more [Less]

A blog post on Gnash by Drascus drew my attention to megavideo.com, a rather ad-heavy but featureful video site that, unlike YouTube, works well in Gnash.