I finally made it! Swfdec 0.7.2 is out in the wild. And now I don’t know what to blog about, because I haven’t used the stable series for such a long time that I don’t even know what the coolest new features are. I had to read the git log for half an hour to remind myself of what we’ve done in the last 3 months.
The coolest thing for me about Swfdec development was when Youtube released their new player and it just worked. But it also works in the stable release, so for end users that’s boring. What I also found cool was the time we invested into our (de)compilation framework that gets used internally to make Flash files easier to debug. We spent a lot of time on it and now have a vivi-rewrite tool, that can do all sorts of interesting things to Flash files (like remove randomness). And again, it’s a feature that I think is very cool, but it’s absolutely uninteresting for end users.
But there are some user-visible features. Swfdec does fullscreen properly now. That’s good for 3 things. First, it’s awesome to watch videos in fullscreen. When hey are fast enough. That’s the second thing: It’s easy to figure out if your X driver setup has Xrender properly accelerated. Because if you have a stuttering video, it isn’t. And last but not least I hope that these weird guys want to watch videos in fullscreen and therefore accelerate render properly.
We’ve also been working together with Mozilla and Gtk Webkit. So Swfdec is the only plugin on Linux now that is translucent and obeys stacking order.
So now, you can all stop asking what’s happening with Swfdec. We’re well on our way to our next stable release in September.
8 comments ↓
First let me say: Great Work! Swfdec Rocks!
But i have one question. At the release note i read:
It now remembers which files the user clicked on to play them and autoplays them the next time.
I hope there is also an easy way to reverse the decision. Because i don’t want to have autoplay e.g. for advertising i just clicked once out of curiosity or just as a blunder.
Excellent! Not too long ago swfdec blows up all over the place, but it seems that some serious progress has been made! I can’t wait for the day when swfdec can replace Adobe’s Flash player. Adobe’s implementation crashes Firefox all the time and doesn’t do fullscreen properly.
This is just so cool!
pinky: Yes, it also remembers which files you stopped playing via right-click – uncheck playing and does not play them again.
congratulations, cool work!
“So Swfdec is the only plugin on Linux now that is translucent and obeys stacking order.”
I did not realise that. Will be removing Flash and installing swfdec tonight then :)
I installed it as described in “Source download” on http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/Installation, but Firefox 3 doesn’t find the plugin (not listed in about:plugins). Are these instructions still up to date for Firefox 3?
Thank you!