Posts Tagged Lightspark

Lightspark 100% volume issue is now fixed

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.


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Lightspark 0.5.7 released

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.


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Lightspark 0.5.0 — Bacchus released

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.

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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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Lightspark 0.4.8 released!

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.
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Lightspark 0.4.8 RC1 is out!

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.

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Lightspark 0.4.7.1 released

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 :-)

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Lightspark 0.4.6.1 released

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

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Lightspark 0.4.6 released

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.


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FOSDEM!

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.

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