[ltp] flash 9 linux released

[Andrew Barr]

On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 15:57 +0100, Grant Williamson wrote:
> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2007/01/flash_player_9_for_linux_x86.html 

I am waiting for Gnash, personally. The Flash 9 player, at least the
beta, is a PITA (one that I'm not willing to deal with) on AMD64, if it
will work at all; what's more, because of the asinine design decisions
on the part of Adobe, there is _no_ hardware acceleration used, and
while they manage impressive performance despite that, it causes my
Thinkpad R51 (1.6 GHz P-M with 768 MB RAM) to seize up every time
something _other_ than the playing Youtube (or whatever) video grabs the
CPU's attention--incoming message in Gaim, for example.

Personally, I wish there was a Mozilla plugin that was smart enough to
emulate the vast majority of the Flash video player apps in native C/C++
using Xvideo and Mplayer. There are Greasemonkey userscripts for
Youtube, but it doesn't work for other sites or Youtube embeds. (Aside:
It amuses me that there are 2,000 different Flash video player apps yet
this is the same proprietary software crowd that sees the supposed
fragmentation of the Linux desktop as a weakness.)

Flash has two uses on the Web--adverts and video. The former I have no
use for and is largely blocked by Adblock Plus. We already _have_ video
player plugins, there's no need to be redundant. There are, of course,
incredibly badly designed sites that use Flash for almost everything but
fortunately I don't deal with any of those on a regular basis.

Andrew