Lightspark 0.4.1 has been released today, fea­tur­ing ini­tial YouTube sup­port, and of course the usual per­for­mance improve­ments. As the plu­gin is cur­rently very sta­ble every­one is invited to test and mea­sure the CPU con­sump­tion of lightspark ver­sus Adobe’s player. Dur­ing my pre­lim­i­nary tests lightspark resulted up to twice as fast! This is of course not a com­pletely fair com­par­i­son, as Lightspark is not fea­ture com­plete yet.

It should be noted that only the YouTube videos served using the new AS3 player are sup­ported, those are the ones with the new UI. YouTube cur­rently uses a legacy AS2/Flash8 player for older con­tent and that should be fully sup­ported by Gnash.

More­over, with this release, Lightspark has been reli­censed from GPL3 to LGPL3 to avoid licens­ing issue when dis­trib­ut­ing the plu­gin with non GPLed browsers such as Chrome