what happened to linuxflashplugin?

[Danny Pansters]

On Wednesday 13 February 2008 20:17:03 you wrote:
> > Let me be the one to point out the (next) controversial thing:
> > here's a
> > perfect example why using linux binaries for stuff like this is
> > a dead end.
> >
> > And don't even start about the PC-BSD folks who want to make
> > flash9 work....
> > via WINE.
> >
> > We need a native flash or a replacement for the animation side,
> > and where
> > flash is merely used as a video container, we have not option
> > but to use
> > youitube-dl, miro, and the like. But there too, some native
> > solution is
> > needed, otherwise it will continue to work like crap if at all.
>
> Personally, I tried both gnash and swfdec. It was several months ago.
> They worked just fine on some sites, silently didn't work on other sites.
> But the problem was that sometimes I saw another behaviour: after
> opening a webpage I couldn't interact with the computer at all. Mouse
> was moving on the screen, but nothing could be done either by mouse
> or keyboard. Actually, the only button working on the computer was
> power off on the front panel of the computer, next to reset... So, I felt

I think this is problems with the various XEmbed implementations (IIRC its API 
itself has been a moving target too).

> browsing the internet just like a miner game: if you catch the "wrong"
> site, you need to reboot. I can't afford that, so I removed them and
> installed back the linux flash player. I'm not sure what exactly caused
> the problem - flash itself, or something between flash and KDE;

On konqueror, (kde3), I can confirm that the newer style xembed as used in the 
linux flash 9 has not yet been (completely?) put into its nsplugin code.

For me, flash7 works, flash9 almost never. It likely depends on which 
(missing) xembed thingies are used. Then there's the general bugginess of the 
flash9 plugin. Whenever konqi seems to choke up my box, I killall -9 
nspluginviewer.

Add to that, last time I looked at it, it looked that (konqueror) the way 
nspluginviewer invokes the actual npviewer.bin out-of-process and its killing 
(if needed) seems errant. There's some RedHat patches that can make this a 
little better.

> I would be able to live with that if native flash didn't hang the computer,
> if it just didn't work silently. Have you tried native solutions recently?

See above. I sometimes use linux-firefox if I really need to. And for youtube 
etc I made an add-on to kmplayer (which port I maintain) called tubestuff, 
that can bypass kmplayer's normal url handling and instead download and play 
the video via dcop. It's not extremely robust but works fairly well for me (I 
don't mind the download time which is typically < half of the video 
playtime). It's not in ports yet, sorry (and it needs to be updated to use 
the new youtube-dl, and I noticed today that my liveleak-dl script doesn't 
seem to work anymore).

Maybe Qt's ActiveQt (wrapper for windows' activex) might be of some value to 
implement active x support to some extend and use the windows targetted 
controls rather than NSplugin. I reckon it possible but it probably won't be 
very easy, all the real heavy lifting would have to be done by the developer 
in question. I'm not volunteering though! ;-)

What does OSX use? ActiveX, npapi, or something entirely different. Does 
anyone know?

>
> Andriy

Dan