Gnash 0.8.9 GNU Flash player arrives

Seven months after the previous update arrived, the Gnash community has released version 0.8.9 of its open source Flash Player. According to the developers, the last few months of development "have been pretty eventful" and the latest version includes several important advances.

Version 0.8.9 of the alternative SWF player now avoids drawing operations when the window is obscured and features support for SWF files with embedded ScreenVideo if FFmpeg or gstreamer-ffmpeg (>= 0.10.12) is in use. Support for SWF8 and ActionScript performance testing have been improved and Gnash is no longer dependent on a singleton Virtual Machine and Garbage Collector.

Other changes include fixes various crashing bugs and for the NPAPI plug-in, as well as JPEG screenshot output support and improved OpenBSD compatibility. Several issues hindering playback of uncommon MPEG4 streams, SWF-embedded ADPCM audio and SWF-embedded PCM audio when using GStreamer have also been corrected.

Gnash can be run as a standalone player or as a plug-in for the Firefox, Chromium and Konquerer web browsers – other Gecko based browsers, such as SeaMonkey, are also supported. It runs on a number of Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and also supports various non-x86 architectures and 64-bit processors.

Last week, the developers behind Lightspark released version 0.4.6 of their alternative GPL licensed Flash Player. The update improved gradient support, reduced graphical glitches and added support for the new Gnash release. The update was followed a few days later by version 0.4.6.1 which was released to address a bug caused by a change in the YouTube player that could cause browser crashes.

Further information about the Gnash release can be found in a post on the Gnash Project blog. Gnash 0.8.9 binaries and source code are available to download from the project's GetGnash.org web site. Gnash is licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).

(crve)