Lightspark 0.4.2 RC2... it shines!


I’m very proud to announce the the sec­ond release can­di­date of Lightspark 0.4.2: the mod­ern, effi­cient and open source Flash Player imple­men­ta­tion. Thanks to all the peo­ple that tested the project and reported feed­back on the bug tracker and on the IRC chan­nel, with­out their help this awe­some results would have not been possible.

Although we’re still miss­ing a cou­ple of fea­ture before the real 0.4.2 most of the pieces are already in place. Let’s see what you can expect from this release:

  • Youtube sup­port for H264 videos. Cur­rently only those are sup­ported as they are played using the Action Script 3 based player. This may seem a huge lim­i­ta­tion, but actu­ally a huge part of the YouTube con­tents are avail­able in H264 for­mat. This lim­i­ta­tion will go away when lightspark will be able to fall back to Gnash. This fea­ture is sched­uled for 0.4.3
  • Even faster video pre­sen­ta­tion after a bit of refine­ment of the SSE2 based video packer
  • Sound sup­port using pulseau­dio. If you want to try Lightspark with­out installing the pulse server that’s ok, as Lightspark detects at run­time if the  server is avail­able and if not it just politely dis­ables sound.

As usual you can grab the source from Launch­pad

Offi­cial binary pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Debian test­ing are avail­able from my PPA http://launchpad.net/~sssup/+archive/sssup-ppa (in launch­pad build queue as I’m writing)

Pack­ages for Fedora 13 are also avail­able here

As I men­tioned before we’re not yet ready for the final release as the fol­low­ing issues needs to be fixed:

  • Sound is not synchronized
  • Sound sam­ple rate is not always cor­rectly detected

Beside those known issue, every­thing should be pretty ok. So go on, give it a try!

  • Felipe Con­tr­eras

    I install the Flash player by copy­ing the .so to ~/.mozilla/plugins/, it’s sim­ple, fast, and easy.

    Installing a bunch of RPMs is not so appeal­ing =/ Is there a way you can pro­vide a sim­i­lar .so?

  • Felipe Con­tr­eras

    I install the Flash player by copy­ing the .so to ~/.mozilla/plugins/, it’s sim­ple, fast, and easy.

    Installing a bunch of RPMs is not so appeal­ing =/ Is there a way you can pro­vide a sim­i­lar .so?

  • Jonatas Esteves

    Build from source or just down­load the pack­age (.deb or .rpm) and unpak it (with File Roller or 7z or any­thing you use) and set-up the files on their respec­tive loca­tions on your sys­tem.
    But be aware: doing it that way you will have to install any needed depen­dency manualy.

    Any­way, when there are good, system-specific pack­ages like those pro­vided, that’s just a very stu­pid way of installing a program.

    But it’s your sys­tem so do as you please.

  • Jonatas Esteves

    Build from source or just down­load the pack­age (.deb or .rpm) and unpak it (with File Roller or 7z or any­thing you use) and set-up the files on their respec­tive loca­tions on your sys­tem.
    But be aware: doing it that way you will have to install any needed depen­dency manualy.

    Any­way, when there are good, system-specific pack­ages like those pro­vided, that’s just a very stu­pid way of installing a program.

    But it’s your sys­tem so do as you please.

  • Palatis

    flash­player is a prop­ertiery and rather “stand­alone” nsplu­gin. lightspark requires some other files than just liblightspark.so, there­fore installing man­u­ally would require more steps than installing adobe’s flashplayer.

  • Palatis

    flash­player is a prop­ertiery and rather “stand­alone” nsplu­gin. lightspark requires some other files than just liblightspark.so, there­fore installing man­u­ally would require more steps than installing adobe’s flashplayer.

  • Fun­gos

    Maybe LGPL3 licensing?

  • Fun­gos

    Maybe LGPL3 licensing?

  • Ilyas

    The result of the first minute of test­ing — Youtube does not work, video on other site has bro­ken a browser. The con­clu­sion, to a plug-in from Adobe is not present till now respon­si­ble replacement

  • Ilyas

    The result of the first minute of test­ing — Youtube does not work, video on other site has bro­ken a browser. The con­clu­sion, to a plug-in from Adobe is not present till now respon­si­ble replacement

  • http://pharaohtechblog.blogspot.com/ Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ)

    Can’t you get lightspark to use GStreamer instead of ffm­peg? Dis­tros like Fedora gen­er­ally won’t include any­thing that uses ffmpeg....

  • http://pharaohtechblog.blogspot.com/ Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ)

    Can’t you get lightspark to use GStreamer instead of ffm­peg? Dis­tros like Fedora gen­er­ally won’t include any­thing that uses ffmpeg....

  • Guest

    The lightspark-common pack­age for Fedora 13, x86_64, is cor­rupt. It fails with:

    error: falló el desem­pa­que­tado de archivos en archivo/usr/lib64/liblightspark.so.0.4.2;4c302b89: cpio: read

  • Guest

    The lightspark-common pack­age for Fedora 13, x86_64, is cor­rupt. It fails with:

    error: falló el desem­pa­que­tado de archivos en archivo/usr/lib64/liblightspark.so.0.4.2;4c302b89: cpio: read

  • Sifnt

    Just wanted to say a huge thank you for this project, it’s look­ing great and the pace of improve­ment is truly awesome :)

    Flash has become unus­able for me on 64bit (ubuntu/arch), too many issues, so a free and fast open source imple­men­ta­tion is very much appre­ci­ated. Thank you!

  • Sifnt

    Just wanted to say a huge thank you for this project, it’s look­ing great and the pace of improve­ment is truly awesome :)

    Flash has become unus­able for me on 64bit (ubuntu/arch), too many issues, so a free and fast open source imple­men­ta­tion is very much appre­ci­ated. Thank you!

  • http://yoshi314.openid.pl/ Your Name

    funny thing is — lightspark still can take down fire­fox, even if using ver­sion >=3.6.4 which should pro­tect against such situations.

  • http://yoshi314.openid.pl/ Your Name

    funny thing is — lightspark still can take down fire­fox, even if using ver­sion >=3.6.4 which should pro­tect against such situations.

  • Castarco

    Does lightspark run on chromium? :p ( In any case ¡Great job! :D )

  • Castarco

    Does lightspark run on chromium? :p ( In any case ¡Great job! :D )

  • Pedro Veloso

    Nice ;). While this is not quite ready for daily usage, I’m happy to see progress is being made.

    Keep up the good work :)

  • Pedro Veloso

    Nice ;). While this is not quite ready for daily usage, I’m happy to see progress is being made.

    Keep up the good work :)

  • Don Kongo

    I want to echo this, gstreamer is the “blessed” depen­dency on all major dis­tri­b­u­tions these days. Unless gstreamer is not able to play the video con­tent of course? Ffm­peg gen­er­ally is a bit ahead on the codecs, after all.

  • Don Kongo

    I want to echo this, gstreamer is the “blessed” depen­dency on all major dis­tri­b­u­tions these days. Unless gstreamer is not able to play the video con­tent of course? Ffm­peg gen­er­ally is a bit ahead on the codecs, after all.

  • http://pharaohtechblog.blogspot.com/ Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ)

    GStreamer can indeed play H264 con­tent and stuff for Flash. Gnash uses it, after all...

  • http://pharaohtechblog.blogspot.com/ Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ)

    GStreamer can indeed play H264 con­tent and stuff for Flash. Gnash uses it, after all...

  • Doux

    I con­firm, I can’t install it on F13 x86_64.

  • Doux

    I con­firm, I can’t install it on F13 x86_64.

  • Drax73

    would not play, made sure to restart fire­fox (3.6.4) , checked pref>apps>SWF file — lightspark-default, was I sup­posed to do some­thing else?

  • Drax73

    would not play, made sure to restart fire­fox (3.6.4) , checked pref>apps>SWF file — lightspark-default, was I sup­posed to do some­thing else?

  • Drax73

    run­ning f13 — 2.6.33.5 – 124 x86_64

  • Drax73

    run­ning f13 — 2.6.33.5 – 124 x86_64

  • apig­notti

    You should report your issue on the bug tracker,

  • apig­notti

    You should report your issue on the bug tracker,

  • apig­notti

    You should report on the bug tracker a back­trace of this crash

  • apig­notti

    You should report on the bug tracker a back­trace of this crash

  • apig­notti

    chromium sup­port is planned for next release 0.4.3

  • apig­notti

    chromium sup­port is planned for next release 0.4.3

  • apig­notti

    ver­ify that lightspark is not con­flict­ing with the offi­cial player, for exam­ple by tem­porar­ily unin­stalling it. Fire­fox is not very good at man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple plu­g­ins for the same data type

  • apig­notti

    ver­ify that lightspark is not con­flict­ing with the offi­cial player, for exam­ple by tem­porar­ily unin­stalling it. Fire­fox is not very good at man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple plu­g­ins for the same data type

  • apig­notti

    I’ll report this to the pack­ager, thanks for the report

  • apig­notti

    I’ll report this to the pack­ager, thanks for the report

  • Pingback: Lightspark continua a maturare | Il blog di altreidee.info

  • Pingback: Lightspark continua a maturare | Il blog di altreidee.info

  • FT

    That is very inse­cure because you clearly can­not have your home direc­tory mounted noexec
    Only a fool browses the open web with /home mounted exec.
    Your per­sonal copy of libflashplayer.so will be the very first file to be infected.

  • FT

    That is very inse­cure because you clearly can­not have your home direc­tory mounted noexec
    Only a fool browses the open web with /home mounted exec.
    Your per­sonal copy of libflashplayer.so will be the very first file to be infected.

  • Dbrodie

    I dream of an ARM ver­sion to have on Maemo/MeeGo/Android/Iphone...

  • Dbrodie

    I dream of an ARM ver­sion to have on Maemo/MeeGo/Android/Iphone...

  • thi­ago

    Hey, it’s work­ing here http://i.imgur.com/DGcWo.png

    Great work!

  • thi­ago

    Hey, it’s work­ing here http://i.imgur.com/DGcWo.png

    Great work!

Lightspark 0.4.2 RC2... it shines!


I’m very proud to announce the the sec­ond release can­di­date of Lightspark 0.4.2: the mod­ern, effi­cient and open source Flash Player imple­men­ta­tion. Thanks to all the peo­ple that tested the project and reported feed­back on the bug tracker and on the IRC chan­nel, with­out their help this awe­some results would have not been possible.

Although we’re still miss­ing a cou­ple of fea­ture before the real 0.4.2 most of the pieces are already in place. Let’s see what you can expect from this release:

  • Youtube sup­port for H264 videos. Cur­rently only those are sup­ported as they are played using the Action Script 3 based player. This may seem a huge lim­i­ta­tion, but actu­ally a huge part of the YouTube con­tents are avail­able in H264 for­mat. This lim­i­ta­tion will go away when lightspark will be able to fall back to Gnash. This fea­ture is sched­uled for 0.4.3
  • Even faster video pre­sen­ta­tion after a bit of refine­ment of the SSE2 based video packer
  • Sound sup­port using pulseau­dio. If you want to try Lightspark with­out installing the pulse server that’s ok, as Lightspark detects at run­time if the  server is avail­able and if not it just politely dis­ables sound.

As usual you can grab the source from Launch­pad

Offi­cial binary pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Debian test­ing are avail­able from my PPA http://launchpad.net/~sssup/+archive/sssup-ppa (in launch­pad build queue as I’m writing)

Pack­ages for Fedora 13 are also avail­able here

As I men­tioned before we’re not yet ready for the final release as the fol­low­ing issues needs to be fixed:

  • Sound is not synchronized
  • Sound sam­ple rate is not always cor­rectly detected

Beside those known issue, every­thing should be pretty ok. So go on, give it a try!