alternatives to adobe flashplayer?

[pickarooney]

Lightspark is unfortunately useless. It won't play embedded stuff. I seem to able to view most videos on YouTube with HTML5 but nothing embedded. Unless anyone knows a way to get Firefox to use HTML for these?

[philinux]

Have you tried the flashaid mozzila addon to fix up flash.

[motorcity909]

I think we all know that Flash is on its way out. Adobe are no longer developing it for mobile platforms, iPads don't have it, Windows 8 won't have it.

Adobe will be giving security updates for the next five years anyway so I'm not worried that I won't be able to watch online videos in a few years time.

We will know Flash is dead and HTML5 has won when the, er, gentlemen's websites start using it - they always back the winners like VHS and BluRay!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Google promotes tools like FlashVideoReplacer in their own app store.

Good! Because I'm loving the extension to death!

And WebM seems to be fine for the majority of videos, hooray!

I still brought this up, because I noticed some videos failed to come up in WebM mode.

[lovinglinux]

Threads merged.


It seems the only viable alternative in the long term will be to use Chrome browser once they release PepperFlash, because Adobe has ended support for Flash on Linux and handed it to Google. Mozilla and Opera won't implement PepperFlash. Lightspark and Gnash are great initiatives, but sadly don't work. I never was able to make Lightspark work at all and Gnash only works on YouTube as far as I know.

[shantiq]

Have you tried the flashaid mozzila addon to fix up flash.

Flash-aid totally fixed all functionality on Firefox [Thank you LL /and Philinux for pointing me there]

In my case it had to remove Gnash AND Lightspark which i had tried to use as replacement; did not realize they would clash


SO ALL FUNCTIONALITY RESTORED



PS ONCE add-on installed one needs to go to the icon and use wizard to complete install, then terminal pops up and shows the changes, very neat.

[TenPlus1]

In a way I'm happy that flash isn't being developed further on linux with only a few years support for the current version. This will finally give users and sites a chance to upgrade to html5 and use embedded movies like ogg theora, webm and h.264. As for flash games, those could still run using the current version and/or the lightspark project once it's up and running properly...

[bcschmerker]

...Unfortunately, I never was able to make Lightspark work. Gnash is functional, but mostly for YouTube. Last time I checked it didn't work on a few sites I needed. It is time for a new series of tests.

I concur, as Gnash does not interact properly with several user-music and -video Websites, as of April 2012. A test of Gnash that I did at SingSnap® Karaoke back in 2011 was a fail, as Gnash did not upstream data in a format that the Website recognizes, unlike all versions of Adobe® Flash Player; specifically, /karaoke/record/wizard did not recognize any return information from Gnash during an attempted audio calibration.

W3C Hypertext Markup Language 5 is not a one-for-one replacement for the proprietary Macromedia® shockwave/flash software architecture still required by many user-music and -video Websites, which have to do major recoding for their pages to function properly in HTML 5 as they used to function in Flash.

[ticket]

The last (11.2?) version of flash does work with the latest Ubuntu (11.10), provided you switch off accelerated rendering.

Adobe struggled to get the accelerated rendering working under Linux for a long time. Some success was achieved via the VPAU feature for those that had nVidia cards, but ATI users got nothing. Now both camps are denied the feature.

So if you have a powerful enough CPU that can cope with the task of software rendering of the flash video, you will be ok, even for 1080p resolution videos. But for older computers, full screen flash will be unusable, and you will only be able to play embedded videos at around 360/480p.

So we have a sort of stop gap, especially for those that have powerful CPUs, until an alternative arrives.

Remember that flash is also used for many on-line games (e.g. runescape), so it will take a while to get those fixed up.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Gnash still appears to be an epic fail for anything other than YouTube!

It can't even play many ads correctly!

Looks like people may be flocking back to XP, for at least 1 more year.

Shame on you, Adobe. You make Linux look like a fool and now people may actually go back to Windows XP O_O.