Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 12:58 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Gnash is a new GNU project to build a media player that's compatible
> with Macromedia "Shockwave Flash" standards and plays common ".swf"
> files.  Gnash will work both as a standalone application, and as a
> browser plugin (initially for Firefox).

Sorry for being the New Years Sourpuss, but...

I'm not sure if people are noticing (probably, they are), but more and
more software (Gnash included) is becoming OpenGL reliant. 

One of the biggest missing pieces in the free software desktop will
increasingly become good OpenGL drivers. I have a Radeon 9200SE, which
has a great free driver, and plays bzflag wonderfully. My Thinkpad has a
Radeon Mobility 9000 (R250), which will hopefully run well with the
upcoming r300 driver. But, these are both fairly crappy chipsets in
comparison to the state of the art, and I'm to understand that beyond
the r300 driver we're not going to get squat.

Obviously, most people know this already, but it's surely getting more
serious over time. OpenGL has to be the way to go, but if all your apps
are GL (I don't know the names of all these things, but font rendering
strikes me as an obvious beneficiary, there is a GL mozilla you can try,
GNOME has some measure of GL support in Gtk+ already, etc. etc.) and you
only have a MESA software renderer, that's going to be an awfully slow
desktop :(

I wish there were some clear solution to this issue....

Cheers,

Alex.