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Lightspark 0.5.0 RC1 is out!


This is a great day for lightspark: the mod­ern, open source, flash player imple­men­ta­tion. I’m very happy to announce that the first release can­di­date for the 0.5.0 release (code­named Bac­chus) has been just released. There are many new fea­tures in this release (see below for a detailed changelog). For the end user the most vis­i­ble changes are:

  • For YouTube: Play/Pause/Enlarge but­tons are now work­ing correctly
  • Ini­tial sup­port for Groove­shark (cur­rently the first song of the playlist works)

And under the hood:

  • Improved XML support
  • Improved FFM­peg based media playback
  • Improved robust­ness
  • Improved Exter­nal­In­ter­face (browser communication)
  • Improved mask­ing support
  • Improved alpha support
  • Improved shader performance
  • Sup­port cap­ture phase of the event flow
  • Sup­port SimpleButton
  • Sup­port audio volume
  • Sup­port for intro­spec­tion of Action­Script objects (describeType)
  • Sup­port for AMF3 serialization
  • Sup­port plu­gin resize
  • Sup­port for dynamic text
  • Removed SDL, Font­Con­fig and FTGL depen­dency from the core
  • Added SDL based audio backend
  • More GLES compliant

Source tar­ball is, as usual, avail­able from Launch­pad. Pack­ages should be avail­able for the major dis­tri­b­u­tions in the next few days.

Please test this release can­di­date and report any bug on the Launch­pad bug tracker.

Just a cou­ple of warnings:

  1. there is an issue with FFM­peg 0.7 that causes a crash. We are aware of the issue and we are cur­rently dis­cussing a fix that should be avail­able for the next release can­di­date. In the mean time please use FFM­peg 0.6.x
  2. The newly added sup­port for dynamic text uses pango as the back­end. Unfor­tu­nately pango is cur­rently not thread safe. Lightspark itself cor­rectly seri­al­ize the pango calls, but there is no sane way to syn­chro­nize with the calls made by the browser thread. This means that the only safe way to use lightspark is to employ out of process plu­g­ins. Luck­ily OOPP is now used by default on the major browser.


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This entry was posted on July 5, 2011, 5:58 pm and is filed under Lightspark. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Poletti Marco

    “For YouTube: Play/Pause/Enlarge but­tons are not work­ing cor­rectly”.
    Is this an improve­ment? Or maybe did you mean “now” instead of “not”? :-)

  • Ste­fano

    XML sup­port! Finally! Great fea­ture list! Well done

  • Anony­mous

    Oops. I meant “now” indeed. I’ve fixed the post :-)

  • Anony­mous

    would there be a non-gtk ver­sion of lightspark?

  • Anony­mous

    gtk is nec­es­sary as it’s basi­cally the only sup­ported way to make a NPAPI plugin

  • James

    fan­tas­tic work!

  • Fred

    Many thanks for this highly use­ful soft­ware.  I am eager to see how to make it work on other sites than youtube e.g. the BBC news videos.   Do you have some sort of test suite or cor­pus of flash sites to test on?

  • David Mal­oney

    Any word on Pow­erPC Linux support?

  • Anony­mous

    PPC (and actu­ally any plat­form) has been sup­ported for a few releases. Sup­port is unfor­tu­nately sub­op­ti­mal as we miss a cou­ple of accel­er­ated assem­bly rou­tines that are avail­able for x86 and amd64. Long term plan is to replace those rou­tines with LLVM IR so that it can be com­piled to the native byte­code of the platform.

  • Yyz82

    it works with Opera browser?

  • Anony­mous

    I’ve done no test­ing per­son­ally, but it will work if Opera is fully NPAPI com­pli­ant. Although Adobe’s player can live even with a reduced set of func­tion­al­ity lightspark really needs all the the APIs.