Posts Tagged Lightspark
Lightspark 100% volume issue is now fixed
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on May 27, 2012
For some time I’ve received a few reports about lightspark raising the system volume to 100% (and “killing ears”) whenever a YouTube clip was started. It took some time for me to figure out what was going on, since I was not able to reproduce the issue on my system and of course the code was not willingly touching the system volume.
It turns out that the issue was caused by the recently introduced “flat-volume” support in PulseAudio. When flat volume is enabled the volume of a stream is absolute and not relative to the system volume. Since the default volume in flash is 100% by spec then Lightspark was unwillingly setting the system volume to an extremely high value, and I’m really sorry for that.
I’ve just committed a fix in git master that should fix this problem for good by properly virtualizing the volume seen by flash and scaling it by the system volume. I hope this helps people with flat volume enabled.
Lightspark 0.5.7 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on May 16, 2012
A new version of Lightspark has been released yesterday. You can give it a try by getting the source code from launchpad. Ubuntu packages should be available shortly from our PPA
Beside a lot of small improvements this new release improves the graphics capabilities, with a focus on Flash features used by games.
Here is the changelog:
* Fixed a few memory leaks
* Improved support for BitmapData::draw
* Support for BitmapData::copyPixels
* Support for soft masking
* Support for memory usage profiling (massif compatible)
Moreover, there has been some work on implementing fully accelerated Stage3D support, it’s still in early design phase... but stay tuned.
Lightspark 0.5.0 — Bacchus released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on July 26, 2011
After the last round of bug fixing and improvements over the release candidate I’m happy to announce that version 0.5.0 of Lightspark, a FOSS flash player implementation aimed at supporting newer flash files (SWF 9+), is finally released.
Beside stability improvements there is no new great new feature since the last released candidate (see here for more info). You can grab your copy of the sources on Launchpad as usual. Packages for both Ubuntu natty and oneiric are available from our PPA. Packages for your favorite distro will be probably available in a short time. I’d also like to say “thank you” to all downstream packagers for the critical work they have always done.
As always bug reporting and testing is very appreciated. If you need any help you can drop into the #lightspark channel on Freenode.
Lightspark 0.5.0 RC1 is out!
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on July 5, 2011
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:
- 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
- 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.
Lightspark 0.4.8 released!
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on May 27, 2011
Just a quick note to announce that Lightspark 0.4.8 has been released! The main difference from the RC1 is that a nasty memory allocation bug has been fixed, greatly reducing the amount of memory used when playing video. This release of the free, high performance, flash player implementation officially supports YouTube (as usual) and Vimeo (new entry!) You can find the code on Launchpad. Testing and bug reporting is extremely welcome. You can also usually find (friendly) support on the #lightspark IRC channel on FreeNode. As a last note, a regression of the NVIDIA proprietary driver forced me to start using nouveau and, although I was fairly skeptic, I’m pretty happy so far. This of course means lightspark will be finally developed and tested throughly on a completely free stack!
Update: I forgot to cherry pick one commit before the release and so 0.4.8 don’t actually build. 0.4.8.1 fixes the issue. Sorry for the silly mistake.
Lightspark 0.4.8 RC1 is out!
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on May 22, 2011
A new release of lightspark, the free, high performance, flash player has been released! This is the first candidate for the 0.4.8 release. Beside the usual ton of fixes and improvements this release includes an initial support for Vimeo.
As you can see form the screenshot the support is still experimental and the video is way smaller than it should be.
Nevertheless this is a really important milestone for our project and proves what I’ve been saying for a long time: Lightspark is _not_ a YouTube specific hack, we are working hard to improve the amount of supported flash features and over time expect more and more sites to work.
Please note that this is a release candidate as many changes has been done, so it’s definitely possible that some issues will come up. Please report bugs on Launchpad as usual. You can find the source for this release on Launchpad as well.
Lightspark 0.4.7.1 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on May 6, 2011
Hi everyone! After quite some time I’m proud to announce the release of a brand new version of the Lightspark open source flash player. The most visible feature for users is that YouTube support is now restored. Under the hood also the code base has been cleaned up a bit. You can get the updated tarball on Launchpad as usual
The work to support Hulu.com is currently on hold as rtmpdump/librtmp seems to be no more able to access Hulu’s contents and we’re waiting for an upstream fix. In the mean time I’m experimenting a bit to add Vimeo.com support and the results are fairly promising
Lightspark 0.4.6.1 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on March 18, 2011
Version 0.4.6 was released no more than a free days ago, but unfortunately a change in the YouTube player exposed a bug that could cause browser crashes. Version 0.4.6.1 fixes the issue and updating is recommended.
I’d also like to share some though and explain why we need to make so many point releases to keep things working. Lightspark shares a lot of similarity with the Wine project in my opinion, as both projects aims at reimplementing from scratch a large (huge for Wine, of course) platform for third party applications.
The “advantage” for Wine is that executables for installed programs (e.g. Microsoft Word) change not so often, and usually updating is under the control of the user. A user that is interested in keeping Wine compatible with a certain application is, most often, free to delay the update until Wine catches up.
Lightspark, on the other hand, needs to execute contents (e.g. YouTube video player) that are mostly out of the user control and new, incompatible, versions of the contents may pop out at anytime and there is very little we can do about it.
The only way we can be faithful to the advertised “YouTube[*] support” is to improve our code whenever a breakage pops up. I understand this is also challenging for distros and packagers because the life span of our stable releases is linked to quite unpredictable events and I’d like to say “thank you” to all the people packaging lightspark for distros in the wild. Your work is exceptional.
[*] As a side note, although currently only YouYube support is stable enough to be used daily, Lightspark is not an YT specific hack. Support for other sites is coming along slowly given our limited workforce. I’ve done some work to have hulu working and I think we’re now 80% done in supporting it. If anyone is interested in contributing to lightspark to have Hulu (or any other popular site) supported, please drop by #lightspark IRC channel on Freenode
Lightspark 0.4.6 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on March 15, 2011
I’m happy to announce that a new version of Lightspark flash player has been released. The release features improved stability and graphics:
- Gradient support has been vastly improved
- Graphical glitches are greatly reduced
- Added support for the upcoming gnash 0.8.9 release
- Added support for profiling ActionScript code
- Added support for muting all sound by pressing ‘m’
- Added support for copying error messages to the clipboard by pressing ”c’
The tarball is, as usual, available on LaunchPad. Binary packages for Ubuntu maverick and natty are available from the Sparkers Team PPA.
Packages for Debian and Fedora will be available soon.
FOSDEM!
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark, Meetings and nice people on January 10, 2011
Having bought the flights I’m now sure I’ll be in Bruxelles, Belgium the 5 and 6 February to visit FOSDEM. As I always do I’ve organized this too late, well after the dealines to apply for lightning talks.
I’ve asked anyway if there are still 10 free minutes, so there is a small chance that I’ll be able to give a short talk about lightspark while I’m there.