Lightspark, free FOSS flashplayer alternative

http://allievi.sssup.it/techblog/?p...ampaign=Feed: sssuptech (Tech @ Allievi SSSUP)

Features
I’ll try to review and summarize what as been done so far, and what is planned for the future.

Lightspark showing video. Profiling graphs can be over layed on the movie.

OpenGL based ren der ing allows for fast ren der ing of geome tries and video frames. More over, although those are not yet sup*ported, blur and other effects can be imple*mented using shaders for max i mum eff i*cency. Using OpenGL tex tures to dis play video frames is a bit less eff i cent than using XVideo, but make it pos si ble to sup port any overlaying/transformation effect that flash provides.
Mostly com plete sup port for the newer ver sion of the flash script ing lan guage: Action Script 3.0, intro duced with Flash 9. Both an inter preter and a JIT engine based on LLVM are pro vided. The pre vi ous ver*sions of the lan guage (sup ported by Gnash, which does not sup port 3.0) run on a com*pletely dif fer ent, and quite weird, vir tual machine. Cur rently Ligth spark does not sup*port the older engine, but most sites (e.g, YouTube) are migrat ing to the newer engine, so we will be fine just with 3.0
Beside the Vir tual Machine Flash pro vides a huge run time libraries that ranges from Video Ren der ing ser vices to XML pars ing. Imple men ta tion of the run time is of course far from com plete, but the archi tec ture of the VM makes it pos si ble to eas ily imple ment the var i ous objects in plain C++. More over, an arbi*trary degree of mix ing between VM gen er ated and C++ code is pos si ble. This means that func tions can be called from what ever con text with out wor ry ing about their origin.
A mozilla com pat i ble plu gin is pro vided, I’ve spent a lot of time try ing to make the code robust to unex pected con di tions and it should fail grace fully and dis play a gen tle mes sage. But, as plu g ins runs inside the browser process, there a not-so-slight pos si bil ity of crashes. Please report any crashes using the bug report ing sys tem of launchpad
As an added bonus, dur ing devel op ment I’ve also added a cou ple of inter est ing per for mance profiling/debugging fea tures which are not pro vided by the orig i nal Adobe player. Key board short cut can be used to enable a pro fil ing over lay, and a prim i tive inspec tor of the objects on screen
There fore I declare lightspark to be in beta sta tus! Now the most impor tant thing that is still miss ing is a nice Logo for the project. I’m very bad at art, so any con tri bu tion is very wel come. And of course the whole project, in a pure open phy los o phy, is open to con tri bu tion! To have a quick glance at the cur rent sta tus it is pos si ble to get lightspark pack aged from our PPA on launch pad.

 

Good, means I won't need to play swf in browser..best to wait awhile I suppose ?

 

Yes VP8 is another promising flash free solution and so is html5.