Get ready everyone! A new Flash is coming. That’s right, hard working community member looncraz™ is developing a new Flash player for us. This version of the Macromedia Flash play will be compatible with version 6 and 7 Flash files. Aside from parsing (done by the gplflash library), this player will be BeOS native. An end of October release date is currently planned but this is always subject to change.
I wouldn’t have posted this to HNN, as the person who said it on OSNews isn’t the most reliable….
gplflash is NOT a Flash 4 player, its a Flash 3 player that just doesn’t die on higher files and supports Flash 6/7 compression. Thats all
Its worse than what the General Coffee Company have already.
Heh, yeah, it has problems. Which is why I have taken the liberty of trashing half the work it does and doing it over.
The BeOS supplied translation kit and media kit already know the compression formats (JPEG and mp3), so no reason to use the other 180KB of junk that the lib contains.
Drawing will be done to an offscreen bitmap, that bitmap will be the only one used by a player. The work will be tough, but I think I can handle it in six weeks time. Though this is still a fairly tentative date. I already have complete parsing of flash 6 and 7, and the scripting apparently is supported for those formats as well, so I simply need to change it from the IPC layout it is more or less hard-coded to use, to BeOS methods.
I may not even remove libjpeg.so from the mix, depends on how adventageous I get.
–The loon
NOTE: I did a hack, and got the frames (JPEG images), converted to BBitmap and was able to display them with practically no extra work, however the method was a hack, so I put this on the back-burner.
Far out man! We support you whatever!
awesome loony, keep it up 🙂
Wow – if this app. will be released I can pay for it !!!!
Cold Fusion – buy the General Coffee Companies Flash. Its Flash 4. This will be Flash 3.
What’s up with Kian?
We need to support all development efforts expecially those that update/expand the compatablity of our operating system.
I’m with Cold Fusion, I’d pay for a Flash 6/7 player.
Well, don’t expect to be paying looncraz. GPLFlash is a Flash 3 playing library. The “BeOS Port” at the moment is nothing more than a clean recompile of the Linux library – which compiles with no changes. Theres no player for it – the X11 player needs shmat(), which BeOS doesn’t have. This is worksaroundable, although its not worth it for a Flash 3 player that runs under X11.
I support the OS fully, I just don’t support people getting users hopes up with promises of things that will never be delivered or will not do what is promised or suggested. And I have to say Looncraz is somewhat guilty of this on a number of occasions
Hey, Kian,
I already bought Flash4 from GCCFP and frankly it’s useless. Let loon work, if he needs some donations to get this done, then let us decide if it’s worth a few bucks. If this is a one step back, two steps forward, who cares? It’s more progress than we’ve seen for a long time. Step aside and let the man work.
Go Loon!!
Its more than one step back. We’re going back an entire, Major revision of Flash. We’re going to lose Opera and NetPositive plugins. Sure, it’ll be free, but it’ll be useless in this day and age.
Anyone is welcome to improve any part of the beos world. Maybe the GCC people ought to ask Looncraz for his help to improve their product. Right or wrong someone has to code. That code may work or be liked enough to inspire some more code.
*Thumps head against wall*
GCCFP cannot do anything with their code, as its licenced from Macromedia. Any GPLFlash player that looncraz makes will be inferior to the GCCFP’s anyway, as it will be for an even older revision of Flash. He could not help them in any way.
Hey, I’ve been waiting for years to get another Flash from GCFP. I bought my copy, I’ve never seen anything else from them. Why don’t they get a new license? I don’t think they have an interest in developing for BeOS anymore.
Regardless, i do not see one other person or group stepping up to the plate. If *you* want to trully develop a new proper flash for BeOS, be my guest. I can’t code, Loon can. So I support his efforts – unles you can show me a better alternative, then step aside. You’ve made you point. We know what we are getting and it’s better than what we have now because it will be able to play newer formats w/o crashing.
Flash 4 is useless – nobody puts anything in Flash4 format anymore. Opera and Net+ are nearly useless with that plugin.
Loon can’t. Nobody seems to have heard me here
GPLFlash is a FLASH THREE playback library. That is one revision OLDER than GCCFP supports.
It won’t be able to play Flash 4, 5, 6 or 7 formats. It will be able to decompress them. It won’t be able to play them any moreso than the GCCFP one, in fact it’ll do it worse
I’m going to paraphrase fyysik from BeZilla here and describe the entire effort as “nothing more than masturbation”, as he uses to describe any pointless effort to provide something worse than already exists.
Also, GCCFP’s player does not crash on Flash 6 or 7 files. It just displays a small white window. Thats not a crash.
I understand you Kian. But maybe GPLFlash is good point to start from?
Not unless you have Macromedia specs or incredible skills of reverse engineering, no, its not.
It would be much easier to sign Macromedias NDA and get the real source and port it.
Mission for beunited? It is possible? I doubt since it can’t be open sourced. Am I right?
Well according to the gplflash website found at http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/, it states that the library is written to handle flash 3/4 and that it supports 6/7. If that is the case(in that is supports flash 4) then this might be just as good as what is already out there but I think the point is, regardless of wether it is better or not, it is an effort to get something accomplished and from this effort, something greater may evolve. But regardless, it doesn’t help anyone to berate anyone’s efforts, be it ‘masterbation’ or not. You gave your warning, why not leave it at that?
It “supports” 4, 6 and 7 – it can extract the data from the swf, but it can only play Flash 3 data.
Again, sign the NDA and port it would be a good yellowTab work … but i think the best thing to do would be to launch a small team to do it and sell it for something like 10 bucks. SO i could be bundle in Zeta is yT pay a royalty to this team for each copy sold and if you are under Haiku, you can buy it.
Anyone that have a society interested ?
We really need something that will work in mozilla/firefox as neither Net+ nor the current version of opera can cope with the majority of contemporary websites. If the General Coffee Company designed something for Firefox, they would get my money.
If Opera updated their browser for BeOS they would also get my money.
The GGCFP plugin does, and always has, worked in Firefox and Mozilla for BeOS.
Kian,
How do I get the GGCFP plugin to work with FireFox?
Once I’ve got this working I will pony up the money.
Thanks.
BeJay
Create a symlink to FlashPlayer in plugins/ in the Firefox directory.
If HaikuNews was up, I have a Flash and Real with BeOS Firefox tutorial on my “Journal” there….