Gnash, The FSF Flash Player, Gets Updated

Announced early this morning was the release of Gnash 0.8.4, which is the third beta release for this Free Software Foundation sponsored project. Gnash aims to become a viable open-source Adobe Flash / SWF Player for Linux and related platforms. Gnash still lacks full support for SWF v8 and v9 specifications, but it's continuing to evolve.

some of the changes in this v0.8.4 release include the SWF Twitter badge now rendering correctly, URL parsing improvements, support for movies embedding multiple sound streams, support for loading PNG and GIF images, improved rendering of SWF movies, support for writing RGB/RGBA PNG images and JPEG images, compatibility with Potlatch OpenStreetMap editor, and XPI packaging support for Mozilla and Firefox. A new utility named flvdumper has also been added to Gnash. The flvdumper utility is used for analyzing FLV video files.

Gnash has also relabeled itself as being a "SWF Player" instead of a "Flash Player", due to Adobe holding the Flash trademark. The Gnash 0.8.4 release announcement can be read on GNU Savannah.

Meanwhile, the official Adobe Flash Player for Linux is currently being readied for the Flash 10 release. This official Flash Player adds in enhanced web-camera support through V4L2 (Video4Linux 2), new 3D effects, an enhanced drawing API, performance improvements, and many other changes.