June 13th, 2007
Gnash, the open source Flash project, releases support for YouTube
I missed that the Gnash team had started a blog, but in going through my feeds I discovered it and found out that they’ve recently added support for viewing YouTube videos. Gnash is an open source project that aims to provide the functionality of the Flash Player. It has had some decent success and has become a fairly trendy project in the open source world.
Gnash has been focused on implementing features from Flash Player 7 and being able to play YouTube videos is a substantial milestone. There were a lot of changes from Flash Player 7 to Flash Player 9, and with the release of the Linux version of the player, the need to download Gnash may be lessened, but it does provide a lot of Flash Player 7 functionality for those who want a true open source solution.
One thing I thought was interesting is that the Gnash team isn’t planning on using/implementing the new virtual machine that we (Adobe) released and used to create the Tamarin project. According to the FAQ, the team has been working on their own virtual machine “and most of the ActionScript classes have been implemented. Therefore there is no benefit in switching to Tamarin.”
If you’re looking for more information you can head over to the Gnash site. I also interviewed Rob Savoye, one of the main guys behind the project. The new version, 0.8.0, has a number of updates:
- Streaming video works with YouTube and Lulu.tv! This has been the
focus for the majority of the time since the last release. - Many core improvements in the VM as our understanding of Flash
improves. These all improve both the correctness of a movie that is
being played, but enables more movies to play that used to not work. - New FLTK2 gui support added.
- Simple Flash debugger added.
- Improved Darwin support that can use the system OpenGL.
- Flash extensions, direct support for file handling, MySQL access,
etc.. through plugins to the Gnash VM. Wrappers for any C/C++ API
libraries can be exported into ActionScript, and used as native
commands in a Flash movie. - Many new testcases! Support for testing with ming, swfmill, amd
mtasc compilers. - New drawing API for MovieClips.
- Updated manuals.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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