DonsDeals Blog: Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player

Search My Blog

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player

You may need this, if you have trouble with Adobe Flash Propriatary Player on your Linux System...

Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player. Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9.
The main developer's web site for Gnash is located on the Free Software Foundation's Savannah project support server. This site allows you to file bugs, or view the sources via the web.

Features

Runs standalone: Gnash can run standalone to play flash movies.
Browser plugin: Gnash can also run as a plugin from within most Mozilla derived browsers, such as Firefox. Gnash also has support for Konqueror.
SWF v7+ compliant: Gnash can play many current flash movies.
Streaming Video: Gnash supports the viewing of streaming video from popular video sharing sites like Lulu.tv or YouTube.com.
XML Message server: Gnash also supports an XML based message system as documented in the Flash Format specification.
High Quality Output: Gnash uses OpenGL for rendering the graphics on the desktop, and AntiGrain (AGG) for embedded framebuffer only devices.
Free Software: Gnash is 100% free software. For more information on the GPL, go to the Free Software Foundation web site.
Better Security: Gnash pays extra attention to all network connections, and allows the user to control access.
Extensible: Gnash supports extending ActionScript by creating your own. You can write wrappers for any development library, and import them into the player.

Get the Software

Status

Gnash is being actively developed at the moment. Therefore, although many features work, not all movies play successfully. The latest beta release of Gnash has been made at version 0.8.7 on Feb 14, 2010.

Downloading Gnash

Gnash source releases (HTTP, FTP) can be found in the subdirectory /pub/gnu/gnash on your favourite GNU mirror.
Win32 users can now download an executable based on the 0.8.2 release, which is now seriously out of date, and won't work with YouTube.
You can get binary snapshots at http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots and http://www.getgnash.org/builds/ built nightly by our automated build system.

Bazaar Access to Sources

The latest Gnash sources are also available via anonymous access. You will need the Bazaar program (usually contained in a package called "bzr").

bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnash/trunk

For more detailed information on bzr usage at gnu.org, read bzr usage at gnu.org (but note that we use a different layout).
If you require a source tarball, you can get the latest version from a directory of daily snapshots on the web.
For other ways to obtain Gnash, please read this page. General information on obtaining GNU software is also available.