Gnash - GNU Flash Player / John Gilmore

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:30:44 +0000,
Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> 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....

I hope this project will succeed:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/5743

Jeroen Dekkers