Penguin.SWF

LOL! What style Mike!

Cue the well-meaning folks who will crow on about how you should use GStreamer, even though the issue is already solved and you're already set into using ALSA...

GStreamer would be a fiasco, since most vendors ship it with MP3 support stripped out.

This project seems to be a great reality check for Linux w/r/t professional development. Are you communicating all these problems back to the kernel developers? Seems like the OS as a whole could really benefit from what you're learning.

Between this post and the last it sounds like you're at or near beta level quality; will we see a public beta in the next few days? (http://www.snakesonaplane.com/ needs Flash 8 or newer ;)

Bugs are never straight forward .. we probably all learnt that the hard way..;)

Anyways debugging is kinda your job when it's closed source :D Sorry Sorry i just have to snick that in. I'm somewhat entertained by the information and I'm not going to go on and on on these age old issues.
I understand(respect) all the descisions, and why most of them are made. Doesn't mean i have to like them.

I am beginning to feel though that this has been streched out about as far as it goes... Gimme Gimme Gimme :P

It would be grately apreciated if you could give us/me a somewhat reliable timeframe as to when we could expect something stable enough to use.. i'm not that intrested in alfa,beta's( or any Greek letter) I want it to just work (don't care about video in).

Ow and it would be rediculously cool if the firefox functionality "install missing plugin" actually worked :) But hey let's not go overboard.

cheers

jaykayess, please...problems they're having have nothing to do with the kernel. it's simply a lack of experience with how alsa and other things work. like tinic (flash developer) himself said, there's a perfectly good explanation for why things are the way they are.

jaykayess,

ALSA also ships without mp3 support (suprisingly) so I suppose that choice will be a fiasco too, no?

BTW, what does this particular ALSA user-space library documentation problem have to do with the kernel. They forgot to put in the API docs that the callbacks may be called in asynchronous signal context. Check MSDN for the level of documentation that professional developers expect (or rather don't expect) and you'll learn a thing or two about Open Source.

BTW, the Linux kernel, and the vast majority of Linux userspace are written by professionals so I think they know all about professional development.

You may be confusing commercialism with professionalism.

If you wouldn't mind, could you run the flash benchmark here:

http://www.powerflasher.de/bench/powerbench.html

and report your scores with both Flash 7 and your in-progress Flash 9?

Is Flash 9 any faster?

Keep up the good work Flash team. I think you are being very reasonable in your handling of some ahem passionate Linux fans.

It would be great of your development lead to a general maturity of professional software tools on Linux.

Well, do what you got to do, but just remember-me on beta testing phase.... you have my email address and name... I can test it on any Linux distro you want on my virtualization grid....

thanks...

and just like any penguinfanatic say... beta plsss... :)

Great to see the work progress :)

Great work Mike (and the others in the team of course)! For me it seems you're quite ahead of your schedule, and that's very pleasing. Plus, I like this blog: you never say you're "so excited about" how cool your product is becoming, and so on. ;)

I have one question I think you've never been asked before, and I'd like to hear an answer for: will Adobe provide a standalone Flash Player for Linux? For some reason, v7 didn't have it, and I would really love to see one available with Flash v9.

Good work guys. We're counting on you to get us a Linux standalone player that is stable and supportable.

ahem passionnate... What a nice euphemism... I won't say what I would have called them because it might start a flame war.

@Tristin:

Interesting benchmark there. I get a 882 score on Linux Flash7, 1432 on Windows XP/IE/Flash8, and 1311 on Windows XP/IE/Flash9.

:D looks great, when you said bad news, i though the flash player for linux was going to be cancelled.

please consider releasing beta versions along the way to the final release.

thanks

I take it there is no way to assume an ETA for a beta release?

@mark, @tristan: ALSA doesn't have any codecs, so no, it's not surprising that it doesn't support MP3. GStreamer is only useful for the codecs it supports; otherwise it's just something that sits in between you and ALSA.

I do not know if alsa is a good idea, when I turn it on on my ff browser it crash...

Hey, alsa is good, but one issue I have is that using flash off a web page won't play unless I start the browzer with esddsp. What about native esd and (Brain Fart) the listener daemon for kde???

ALSA is a great choice. It ships on all Linux distros today. It works well. OSS has been dead for years now. It is unfortunate that Flash 7 (and some other products like Skype) still use OSS, because it doesn't work well.

I'm looking forward to a system with no more need for OSS emulation or whatever.

As el_nota said, there is still the issue with sound daemons on KDE. I'm a dedicated KDE user. I don't fully understand this issue, other than it makes it tricky to get some sound things working on my system.

I'm glad to see some movement on the flash front for linux for my home computers this should work well but with the alsa choice I wont be able to use the newer version on the thin clients at work as i require esd (arts might work also) as the flash is running on the server and the thin clients have the audio card so if alsa is used then it would be playing on the server :\

To whom it may concern.

I know you're sticking with ALSA. This is just a FYI post.
I have recently came across FMOD,
http://www.fmod.org/.

I searched this blog and it seems no-one has mention it yet so I though I'll do it.

It is probably not going to be used in Flash 9, but I was thinking it might be a nice cross-platform API for Flash 10.

Aparently FMOD runs on 13 platforms: Win32, Win64, WinCE, Linux, Linux64, Macintosh (os8/9/10/x86), PS2, PSP, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360,GameCube, Wii.

It also suports a lot of file formats and streams.

I think this might make future maintenace and porting a lot easier.

Louis Cordier,
FMOD licensing is quite unsuitable for inclusion in most linux distributions. I doubt Adobe would be interested in paying for it either, when suitable free/Free alternatives are available...

why do i have flash 9 and yet sites like myspace, photo bucket, etc.. say i have to have a newer version of flash.. when i do.

my question is not really why because i know why but more so how do i fix it, can i? i want to watch pointless movies to!

i know you tube works

[ It sounds like you have an old version of Flash Player 7 hiding on your system that your browser is using. 'locate libflashplayer.so' to find it. -Mike M. ]