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Ciaran O'Riordan | 3 Jan 2006 13:58
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Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore


I just found this surprising new project from John Gilmore:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash/2005-12/msg00000.html

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Gnash is a new GNU project to build a media player that's compatible
with Macromedia "Shockwave Flash" standards and plays common ".swf"
files.  Gnash will work both as a standalone application, and as a
browser plugin (initially for Firefox).

Gnash is based on the excellent work done on the public domain program
"GameSWF", a graphics library for games that contains the heart of a
Flash interpreter.  Further development will aim this code toward the
goal of playing arbitrary Flash "movies".  This goal diverges from the
goals of the GameSWF maintainers (which are to make a good public
domain graphics library for games), and they were unwilling to accept
some of our patches as a result.  We're forking the code and pushing
foward.  New code for Gnash will be licensed under the GPL (version 2
or better).  I'm sure we can contribute public domain bug fixes back
to GameSWF, though our major development will be GPL licensed.

        John Gilmore
----------------

More on John Gilmore here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_%28advocate%29

I found out about Gnash in the Take Action section of the gnu.org homepage.

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Alex Hudson | 3 Jan 2006 14:30

Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:58 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Gnash is a new GNU project to build a media player that's compatible
> with Macromedia "Shockwave Flash" standards and plays common ".swf"
> files.  Gnash will work both as a standalone application, and as a
> browser plugin (initially for Firefox).

Sorry for being the New Years Sourpuss, but...

I'm not sure if people are noticing (probably, they are), but more and
more software (Gnash included) is becoming OpenGL reliant. 

One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will
increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which
has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a
Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the
upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in
comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond
the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.

Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more
serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps
are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering
strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try,
GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you
only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow
desktop :(

I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

Cheers,
(Continue reading)

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Jeroen Dekkers | 3 Jan 2006 15:29

Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

At Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:30:44 +0000,
Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:58 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> > Gnash is a new GNU project to build a media player that's compatible
> > with Macromedia "Shockwave Flash" standards and plays common ".swf"
> > files.  Gnash will work both as a standalone application, and as a
> > browser plugin (initially for Firefox).
> 
> Sorry for being the New Years Sourpuss, but...
> 
> I'm not sure if people are noticing (probably, they are), but more and
> more software (Gnash included) is becoming OpenGL reliant. 
> 
> One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will
> increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which
> has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a
> Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the
> upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in
> comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond
> the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.
> 
> Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more
> serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps
> are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering
> strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try,
> GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you
> only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow
> desktop :(
>
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Alfred M. Szmidt | 3 Jan 2006 15:41
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Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

   One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will
   increasingly become good OpenGL drivers.

Alas, it is easier to write user-space programs than it is to write
drivers.  A user-space program will simply work on all systems that
support whatever libraries it uses (say the C library), where as with
drivers, the API for each and every driver interface is vastly
different.

   I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

There is, simply not supporting companies that refuse to give
specifications to their hardware, and nagging them to release these
specs.  The OpenBSD community has been very sucessfull in this regard,
and it is a bit of a shame that the GNU project, the FSF and FSFE have
been a bit lacking.
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Alfred M. Szmidt | 3 Jan 2006 15:46
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Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

   I hope this project will succeed:

   http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743

Sadly, the Open Graphics Project is a very short term solution.  We
cannot expect people to go out of their way and buy specialised
hardware for their computers.  Nor can we expect ourselfs to build
completely free hardware for each and every type of device that is out
there.  Software is so much nicer in this regard...

We _must_ presure big companies to release their specs, so that all
users of computers can have the freedom that they deserve.
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Andres K. Foerster | 3 Jan 2006 16:15
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Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

Am Tuesday, dem 03. Jan 2006 schrieb Alfred M. Szmidt:

>    I hope this project will succeed:
> 
>    http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743
> 
> Sadly, the Open Graphics Project is a very short term solution.  We
> cannot expect people to go out of their way and buy specialised
> hardware for their computers.  Nor can we expect ourselfs to build
> completely free hardware for each and every type of device that is out
> there.  Software is so much nicer in this regard...

You are right with that, but...

> We _must_ presure big companies to release their specs, so that all
> users of computers can have the freedom that they deserve.

Nobody will open the specs, until anybody starts with it...
If the Open Graphics Project has success, if there is a market for it, 
it will be a presure to other companies, because they don't want to lose
that part of the market. So let's hope it will be a success. Let's make
it a succes. It could be a door opener...

--

-- 
AKFoerster
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Alfred M. Szmidt | 3 Jan 2006 16:35
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Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

   > We _must_ presure big companies to release their specs, so that
   > all users of computers can have the freedom that they deserve.

   Nobody will open the specs, until anybody starts with it...

Which is why we as users, must bitch and moan loudly.  Many companies
already release their specs for drivers.  Some don't, these should be
painted in the darkest colour possible until they do what is morally
sound.  ATI used to release the graphic card specifications for
example...
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Sam Liddicott | 3 Jan 2006 17:55

Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

Jeroen Dekkers wrote:

One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond the r300 driver we're not going to get squat. Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try, GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow desktop :( I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....
I hope this project will succeed: http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743

But you can't tell everyone whose GNU flash animations are slow: tough! you should get an open-gl graphics card, can you?
Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash animations?
What about everyone+dog with their old 2D graphics card?

Sam
<div>
Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid873bk5s7uv.wl%25jeroen@..." type="cite">
<br><blockquote type="cite">
    One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will
increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which
has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a
Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the
upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in
comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond
the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.

Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more
serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps
are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering
strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try,
GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you
only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow
desktop :(

I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

  </blockquote>

I hope this project will succeed:

<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743">http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743</a>

</blockquote>
<br>
But you can't tell everyone whose GNU flash animations are slow: tough!
you should get an open-gl graphics card, can you?<br>
Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash
animations?<br>
What about everyone+dog with their old 2D graphics card?<br><br>
Sam<br>
</div>
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Alex Hudson | 3 Jan 2006 18:37

Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 16:55 +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> But you can't tell everyone whose GNU flash animations are slow:
> tough! you should get an open-gl graphics card, can you?
> Is hardware opengl really going to be a requirement to play flash
> animations?

It's pretty much going to be a requirement full-stop. The vast, vast
majority of PCs out there have some form of 3D support built into them,
and most desktops will need it in some form in the next few years. 

We already rely on some form of hardware acceleration I think; a
non-accelerated X server is very slow. What we're talking about is a
change from using of 2D functions (e.g., blitting) to 3D (e.g.,
compositing).

As an example of the kind of development that needs 3D hardware
acceleration:

	http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6498

3D-type operations are really useful for doing things like drawing SVG
objects (a standardised alternative to Flash), fonts, but it also makes
the application a lot more consistent cross-platform apparently. 

Of course, you don't need 3D hardware in order to do that kind of
drawing, but it's very slow without use of it :(  There is already a
version of Mozilla that requires GL, and various toolkits, font
rendering systems, etc. There is a GL X server in heavy development, and
obviously most games but also many multimedia programs use GL for video.
You just can't run a fully GL desktop off a software runtime, and it
looks like everyone is going GL...

Cheers,

Alex.
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Andres K. Foerster | 3 Jan 2006 19:20
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Re: Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

Am Tuesday, dem 03. Jan 2006 schrieb Alfred M. Szmidt:

>    > We _must_ presure big companies to release their specs, so that
>    > all users of computers can have the freedom that they deserve.
> 
>    Nobody will open the specs, until anybody starts with it...
> 
> Which is why we as users, must bitch and moan loudly.  Many companies
> already release their specs for drivers.  Some don't, these should be
> painted in the darkest colour possible until they do what is morally
> sound.  ATI used to release the graphic card specifications for
> example...

But AFAIK nobody released specifications for 3D hardware acceleration 
yet. That is, what I meant with "anybody has to start with it".

--

-- 
AKFoerster
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