Eight Interesting Improvements In GNOME 2.22

Flash Support On The Desktop: Another new addition to the GNOME family in the 2.22 release is swfdec-gnome. While most users are just interested in viewing Adobe Flash files inside their web browser, swfdec-gnome provides free software Flash support outside of the browser. The swfdec-gnome package provides swfdec-player, which is a standalone Flash player using libswfdec, and swfdec-thumbnailer. Swfdec-thumbnailer is for providing Flash thumbnails for SWF files inside of the Nautilus file browser, which worked out quite nicely in our tests.

Totem Makes Friends With MythTV, YouTube: While GNOME's movie player, Totem, is far from being a new project, in GNOME 2.22 are several enticing additions. Totem 2.22 features plugins for YouTube and MythTV. The YouTube plug-in allows you to search and browse YouTube.com video files all within Totem. The MythTV plugin for GNOME allows you to view recordings from a MythTV server as well as view live TV. We have especially enjoyed the MythTV plug-in and look forward to its continued development. Two other new Totem plug-ins are Publish and Tracker, which allows you to share your current playlist via HTTP and search for videos, respectively. The Totem 2.21/2.22 branch also contains other improvements and fixes for this movie player.

Rhythmbox Plays To A New Beat: Further enriching the multimedia capabilities in GNOME 2.22 are several changes to Rhythmbox, the GNOME music manager and player. Among the changes since Rhythmbox in GNOME 2.20 are automatic GStreamer plug-in installation, improved Podcast feed support, Mozilla plug-in for handling itms:// links, supports Sony PSPs with newer firmware, improved UPnP support, DAAP smart playlists and radio streams support, support for more lyric sites, threaded Python plug-in capabilities, and support for playback from FM radio tuners.