Adobe Flash Player Alternative?

Does anyone know a Flash Player that one can use as an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player? I don't like Adobe software in general and am sick of having to deal with their Flash Player.

After dealing with countless problems with Adobe Reader (crashes, resource hog, etc), I looked for another PDF Reader and found Foxit Reader. Roxit Reader is GREAT! I experience none of the problems I had with Adobe. I'd like to make a similar switch from Adobe's Flash Player as well.

 

HTML5

Well, you can try Gnash. Not really stable thing for me, YMMV.

Edit: Windows release is horribly outdated. Probably not of much use unless you compile the latest version yourself. If you only need to play FLV files, then VLC, mplayer or whatever ffdshow-based is a better solution.

 

Most of what you said is over my head

Is there no self-contained installer that will give me flash so I can avoid Adobe?

 

You need to tell us whether you need a browser plugin (Youtube etc.) or just play the FLV junk. For the first one, no, nothing useable apparently without compiling it yourself.

 

I hate having to use Flash. I wish they could make the whole Flash thing as part of the browser itself so there was nothing to have to install.

 

Well... that won't solve your problem. In fact, Google has done exactly that w/ Chrome in latest alpha stuff. It's still the same crappy stuff from Adobe, just autoupdating. The only real alternative is either HTML5 or ignore flash altogether (and get rid of the annoying advertising abuses of this "technology" at the same time). For sites that don't work w/o Flash at all - well, best thing is to ignore them because the authors of such pages are morons.

 

We could all go back to the time when one website demanded Quicktime, another RealPlayer, another Windows Media Player, and so on and so forth. Trust me, that wasn't fun either. HTML5 media is already starting to cause problems because one browser wants to use the OGG codec, another the H264 codec and none willing to make it simple and use both. So unless that gets straightened out, we're about to go a good 10 years backwards in time, imho. As for the Flash issue, no, there really isn't an alternative that is worth bothering with. Also, I personally think Chrome is getting set up for Swiss cheese status with this idea of integrating Flash into the browser automatically.

 

This is all wrong design. The browser should use whatever is able to play the content and is installed on the particular system. Not bundle the stuff itself. Just use the DLL/SO plugin for playback. Having zillions copies of various versions of the same library installed (or worse yet statically linked into a binary) is a sure way to vulnerability hell. Heck, Adobe and lots of others are a prime example of this stupidity with shipping loads of buggy and outdated JRE/Flash versions bundled with their apps just because they are way to lazy to write the code properly so that it could use the latest JRE/JDK installed on system. Security nightmare.

 

If you're looking for a non-streaming player, i.e. one for which you'd actually have to download and save the FLV file(s) first, my son steered me to the fairly good (and free) one from Applian. Both Winamp and Media Player can supposedly handle FLVs, but neither one comes with the appropriate codecs while (IIRC) the Applian one does.

 

I read the New Tivo uses Flash. The series 3 Tivo saw a big plunge in reliability of operation from Series 2. I fear Series 4 will be terrible, especially depending on Adobe Flash.

the solution seems to me to be HTML5. Go with the open source codec and then you have wide-spread availability.

 

IE9 will be released in less than a year and HTML5 will really go mainstream by then at least or earlier. So just wait, and be thankful in the thought that 2010 was the year we could ditch another product made by Adobe's rubbish coders.

 

My biggest complaint with flash player is the FlashUtil10x.exe process that wants to load and then possibly not unload when you close out of a flash content page. Thanks to Malware Defender, I permanently block it.

 

Amen!

 

Where are you getting your information? From everything I've seen, a new preview will be released every 8 weeks, the second of which will occur in July. These, to my knowledge are more developer previews, not Betas. So, going by that, and knowing there will at least be a couple of Beta releases, a more realistic true release would be early 2011.

Also, HTML5 is really just BARELY being implemented. It could be years before it's used everywhere (what I deem as mainstream). And, if we're talking media, I still say that browsers and websites choosing either OGG over H264 and vice versa, and not supporting both, is going to cause problems. That's my take on it.

 

Whatever happened to Microsoft's Silverlight? It was supposed to be an alternative to Adobe Flash. Why hasn't it become mainstream yet? Something wrong with it?

 

My guess? With Flash being almost THE standard in media-rich websites, small online games, and such, the desire to switch all that to Silverlight just wasn't there. There's likely a lot more to the story, but the lack of desire to change is likely a biggie.

 

Silverlight was supposed to be the coming "in" thing, so I did install it ages ago. But after 2 or 3 months of never once running into a site that used it, I eventually took it back out again.

 

i tried html5 and it's fine by me

 

Most likely it is a licensing issue with Silverlight. Developers and website owners have to pay a fee to Microsoft to use Silverlight on their websites and probably they could not agree to a suitable tariff with Microsoft.

I do not know the pro and cons of Silverlight compared to Adobe flash, but I would have liked a little healthy competition out there. The thing I dislike most about flash is that there is no option to manually set the amount of content one can buffer while watching a streaming video. Since my DSL speed fluctuates, so I normally like to buffer about 30 seconds of video, otherwise the video does not stream smoothly.

 

With public setbacks behind it, Silverlight shines

 

Probably what cnet's author meant was that Silverlight has now taken 1% market share from Flash. I do not find Silverlight anywhere. Even MSN websites still use Flash. Hopefully, the situation will improve in a couple of years.

 

By then OGG or H264 video will be more prevalent, imho. I honestly think Silverlight basically missed bus, so to speak. We'll see though.