Lightspark Flash Player Continues To Advance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lightspark Flash Player Continues To Advance

Back in May we reported on the Lightspark Flash Player that was developed by a free software developer using Adobe's released SWF/Flash documentation and has hit a point where its ActionScript 3.0 support is nearly complete, has a JIT engine that leverages LLVM, supports OpenGL rendering, and boasts various other features as an open-source Flash Player alternative to Adobe's binary plug-in. Today a new release candidate of Lightspark 0.4.2 is available...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODM5Ng

[wswartzendruber]

Good. GNU is beginning to outlive its usefulness.

[faemir]

What I don't get is why are there so many seperate projects for opensource flash? Lightspark, Gnash, swfdec. Can't they work together instead of duplicating the work?

[not.sure]

Does anybody know whether smokescreen is still alive and being worked on?

[Svartalf]

What I don't get is why are there so many seperate projects for opensource flash? Lightspark, Gnash, swfdec. Can't they work together instead of duplicating the work?

Because they've got differing goals.

swfdec is more geared for embedded applications- and honestly isn't really a good fit for much of anything else.

Gnash was the FSF's answer to the problem, based off of GameSWF and might be considered as a solution for all- but it's not the same thing as Lightspark. FSF is working on a complete Flash replacement that's at least adequate in nature.

Lightspark's more akin to what we see in Flash right now. If Lightspark is well enough along, it should outstrip Gnash in performance and Flash in stability where it supports whatever functionalities Flash does. Lightspark's aiming for something different than Gnash has- and you'll note that it can do h.264 video playback within Flash videos, and Gnash kinda can't... But Lightspark can't do some things Gnash does right, albeit very slowly.

As for working together instead of duplicating effort, I'll ask if you view the same thing with KDE and GNOME? If so, WHY? If not, why is it you think this is duplicating the work? As an observation, there's differing goals with each of these projects and while the end-result is being able to play back Flash, each one goes about it differently and covers differing needs/aspects of the Flash specification.

[TechMage89]

As far as I can tell, swfdec development is basically dead... hasn't been worked on for over a year.

Lightspark seems really promising, and they do seem to be cooperating to a signficant extent with Gnash, although the Gnash codebase is apparently not in a state where they think it is worth it to pull code from it. I hope they can help fill some of their feature gaps, e.g. AS 2.0, by pulling stuff from swfdec. I'll be glad for the day when I can ditch Adobe flash player once and for all.

[wswartzendruber]

Which one has fewer dependencies. I'm guessing LLVM is kind of a big one.

[DanL]

I really hope this thing gets a few more audio options than pulseaudio (gstreamer would be nice).

What I don't get is why are there so many separate projects for opensource flash?

Judging from gnash's website/wiki/documentation, development looks to have really slowed (but maybe they're still hacking away at the code and don't update the site until they're ready for a release).

[Ex-Cyber]

Lightspark does seem promising, but it also seems to hit the drivers pretty hard. I managed to lock up my system with it recently.

[Zhick]

I really hope this thing gets a few more audio options than pulseaudio (gstreamer would be nice).

Why the hell gstreamer? gstreamer isn't even a audio-framework, but a media/codec-one. What'd be the advantage of having gstreamer over pulseaudio/plain old alsa (the only other option this should implent imho)?