Flash viewer for FBSD

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 07:29:48 +0100, Sabine Baer <baerks at t-online.de> wrote:
> OK, I really didn't know youtube_dl (and clive someone mentioned in
> the thread). So, thanks a lot.  I youtube-dl-ed my puff pastry examle.
> It took me 5 minutes and 11.69M space on diks but then I was able to
> look at it using mplayer. Fine.  Same with clive. Fine too.

The option "youtube-dl -a" is fine, too, because it creates
an AVI file on the fly, so you can even share downloaded
videos with persons who don't have the luck of being able
to use mplayer (with its ability to play every format).
It's even possible to combine youtube-dl and mplayer in
a way that playing the video starts along with the download,
and because the download is linear (to the video itself),
you can watch while downloading (thanks to mplayer being
able to play incomplete video files), even fullscreen
is possible.



> I remember, when I had linux-fc4 installed and flashplugin7, I tried
> to look at a video on the site http://www.hr-online.de. The only
> result was "you haven't the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player".
> I wrote an email to them and got an answer (that's remarkable, not
> 'normal', I wrote 2 complaints about accessibility to given contact
> addresses at European community sites and didn't get any answer) but
> it wasn't helpful.

Yes, "the latest version", a common problem. What a luck
that things like HTML are standard; just imagine a message
like "This page is optimized for HTML 8. You currently
have HTML 7 installed. The page cannot be displayed at
all." :-)

That's the difference between standards and what you
called "quasi standards" (which are no standards at all,
in my opinion).



> Well, this site and http://news.bbc.co.uk as well are "barrier-free"
> so I can use them with lynx only and the videos are a surplus.

Personally, I don't have much fun viewing pages in lynx,
but it is an excellent validator to find out how, for
example, blind persons see (in the meaning of "content
reception", of course) web pages. On very "modern" and
"optimized" web pages, they don't see anything.



> But I am in the "target audience" of www.hr-online.de at least.
> [...]
> But I'm tired of sitting in front of my monitor and thinking 'if they
> don't want me to look at their content, it's their misfortune'.

The keyword here is "target audience". If you consider
yourself to be in the target audience of a certain service,
you need to fulfill requirements to participate on this
service, e. g. having a driving license in order to be
part of the motorized traffic. And if HR-online requires
you to run "the right" OS and "the right" programs, then
you don't have much choice. So if the usage of a certain
family of formats intendedly excludes users of many
operating systems...

Furtunately, "Flash" is quite usable on FreeBSD, allthough
there are more than one form to run it (linux binary,
OpenSolaris in a VM, "Windows" version in wine). So
there usually are ways to see the content that is not
intended for us. :-)

And I may add that I am thankful to the developers who
invest their time in order to provide an ongoing support
for "Flash". So maybe it always lasts some time until a
FreeBSD based system is able to run the lastest "Flash"
stuff, but finally it's possible.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...