Re: [Gnash-dev] Re: OLPC 767 Gnash 0.8.3 + Flash developer perspective

[Benjamin Wolsey]

> The thing is, it's so much easier to just give up and install the
> Adobe Flash plugin than to jump through so many arcane steps trying to
> get sound working in Gnash on OLPC XO-1 laptops out of the box in the
> latest OS build, 8.20.
> 
> As of now, I still haven't gotten sound working in Gnash 0.8.3 on the
> latest version of Sugar-XO-1 OS out of the box, and the suggestions on
> the Olpc-devel list haven't been very successful because the OLPC dev
> team decided to use an older version of Gstreamer due to hardware mic
> compatibility problems. Because of this, I couldn't get
> gstreamer-plugin-ugly to install on build 767 via yum. (you guys will
> have to pardon me, I'm relatively new to Linux and am thus am
> unfamiliar with digging through specific repositories).

This is what I find completely and utterly maddening about Flash on the
OLPC.

Gnash works *perfectly well* with sound in most cases. But it won't on
the OLPC, because the OLPC refuses to distribute MP3 or FLV decoders.
And why? They are *free and open source* software, but may perhaps in
some countries possibly have patent encumberments. Or maybe not.

Well, fine: so perhaps it's a legal grey area to distribute them and
OLPC doesn't want to get its fingers burnt. I've always had mplayer and
ffmpeg installed by default on 100% Free GNU/Linux distros, so quite how
much danger of being sued there is I don't know. And I'm not a legal
expert, so perhaps I misunderstand the issues.

But how can the answer then be for OLPC project members to recommend
installation of a proprietary player that has MP3 and FLV codecs (and
various others) built in?!

It's a completely ridiculous situation, and I'm sick to the back teeth
of hearing about it, not least because there's absolutely nothing the
Gnash project can do. If you want to play Flash content, you need those
codecs. That's all there is to it. We can link to gstreamer's
codec/plugin identification service (and as far as I know, we do), but
we can't decode MP3 without using an MP3 decoder.

So they should either distribute Gnash (and preferably a more recent
version than 0.8.3) and find an *easy way* to get the required codecs,
or deliver another generation of children to Microsoft and Adobe. It
depends where their priorities are. 

We'll do what we can to support the content, and bug reports or comments
from Flash developers are extremely helpful in improving Gnash. I hope
we can provide daily builds so that developers can use an up-to-date
build, as bugs get fixed daily.

Benjamin.

PS I'm not ranting at anyone in particular. I was pretty disgusted about
the OLPC's windows deal, though.

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