14 DAY TRIAL // Gnash is a project aiming to create a player and browser plug-in for the Adobe Flash file format which is free software, replacing the proprietary software niche currently occupied by Adobe Flash Player. A few days ago, the Gnash team announced their third alpha release, Gnash 0.8.0
More specifically, Gnash should work with Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera browsers and it should be able to support many SWF v7 features and ActionScript2 classes. There is also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86 processors, and 64 bit architectures.
Highlights:
- streaming video works with YouTube and Lulu.tv. This has been an important milestone since the latest release before 0.8.0 - core improvements in the VM. which lead to a better playing back way for most movies but also offers the possibility for some movies that used to not work to be payable now - new FLTK2 GUI support added - Simple Flash debugger added - improved Darwin support that can use the OpenGL system - Flash extensions, direct support for file handling, MySQL access, etc. through plug-ins to the Gnash VM. Wrappers for any C/C++ API libraries can be exported into ActionScript, and used as native commands in a Flash movie - support for testing with ming, swfmill, and mtasc compilers - new drawing API for MovieClips - updated manuals
Gnash can be compiled and executed on many architectures, including x86, AMD64, MIPS/Irix, and PowerPC, unlike Adobe's official Linux player which is available only on x86 in a binary-only form. It also supports the BSD based operating systems. Gnash also comes with special features not available in Adobe's player. For example, it is possible to extend the ActionScript classes via shared libraries. Sample extensions include MySQL support, file system access and more.