Adobe Releases Last Linux Version of Flash Player

dartttt writes "Adobe has released Flash Player version 11.2 with many new features. This is the final Flash Player release for Linux platform and now onward there will be only security and bug fix updates. Last month Adobe announced that it is withdrawing Flash Player support for Linux platform. All the future newer Flash releases will be bundled with Google Chrome using its Pepper API and for everything else, 11.2 will be the last release."

Re:OS alternative?

[alexgieg]

For YouTube, just enable the HTML5 experiment [youtube.com]. No Flash needed.

Re:That didn't last long

[GiMP]

Actually, there was a Linux flash player since version 6... The support hasn't always been good or well-synced with the Windows/MacOS releases, but it has existed for quite a long time. 64-bit support has only been available since version 10 or so.

Re:OS alternative?

[meist3r]

This is not yet an alternative at least not for all users. I'm using Lubuntu and Chromium on a netbook and a very old PC and on both systems the playback with the HTML5 player is choppy and the sound recently stutters and lags. Up until about two weeks ago any version of Chrome and Chromium would simply crash all the video tab renderers on loading the YT HTML5 player. Also other sites like revision3.com won't even begin to display content in HTML5. There is some serious work to be done across platforms to make this a viable alternative. I've been begging for flash to die for years but if this is the near future I have to consider getting a windows install just to watch internet videos or (semi-legally) download even more video source files which is inconvenient.

Re:OS alternative?

[tqk]

How close are we to an open source alternative that actually works for most flash tasks ...

These work fine for what I do (Debian):

i browser-plugin-gnash - GNU Shockwave Flash (SWF) player - Plugin for Mozill
i A gnash - GNU Shockwave Flash (SWF) player
i A gnash-common - GNU Shockwave Flash (SWF) player - Common files/libr

Re:Features

[recrudescence]

If that's what they mean by "withdrawing support", then yes. But I don't think that's what they mean.
From TFA: "Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release".
And then, nothing.

Re:OS alternative?

[jones_supa]

Here's a link to a MPlayer YouTube script [multimedia.cx] which also allows playing on the fly. It uses youtube-dl as a helper to fetch the exact video location URL from which MPlayer starts buffering.

Now we just need a Firefox/Chrome extension to make a nicely clickable button which passes the browser URL to the script. One problematic thing here too is that while MPlayer can seek, it does seem to not know the length of the video, so I don't know the current position.

Re:Good Riddance

[Yvan256]

Vimeo works 100% without Flash, unlike YouTube.

Re:Good Riddance

[TheRaven64]

About half of youtube works without Flash installed

I've been using ClickToPlugin, which fetches the HTML5 version of YouTube videos for a while and I've not seen the Flash player for a good six months.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe will keep supporting Flash on Android, for example.

Not according to Adobe they won't...

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html

Re:Good Riddance

[WrecklessSandwich]

You should probably start looking into making your games with less terrible technology. Go ahead and keep making games by all means, just, not with the godawful abomination that is Flash.

Mozilla definitely won't support the Pepper API

[Anonymous Coward]

Josh Aas (Mozilla Corporation) 2012-03-23 11:26:00 PDT [mozilla.org]
removed Whiteboard: Revisit decision in 2015

Re:Good Riddance

[Ucklak]

YouTube works without flash. That's one of the nice things about it. Forward compatibility.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[jedidiah]

DVD regions are trivial to defeat. Multi-region players are available widely, cheaply, and legally. In some jurisdictions, it's even legally mandated that disk players not enforce those restrictions.

DVD regions are a paper tiger compared to web services.

Regression as a parting shot?

[gottabeme]

And as a parting shot at Linux users, Adobe introduces a major regression [launchpad.net] (hardware accelerated video tints everything blue [archlinux.org], e.g. YouTube), claims it can't be reproduced, and closes all bug reports [archlinux.org] about [adobe.com] it, leaving users to implement a nasty hack [nvnews.net] individually.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[TheRealFixer]

Hulu ARE the copyright holders. They're 90% owned by NBC, FOX and ABC, so of course they have no negotiating power with their masters. It's why everything with Hulu sounds like a great idea at first, and is then immediately crippled by draconian DRM and advertising idiocy.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[KingMotley]

It doesn't necessarily have to be the end of free as in free as beer, but worst case scenario it is, sure. You might as well be complaining that mozilla has to pay for bandwidth for everyone to download the browser from their site, or grab add-ins. That isn't free either. They'll just pay the license fee out of the revenue they get from google for having them as their default search engine. Whoopee.

Not all "FOSSies" are clueless, they just aren't just aren't as a religious zealot about not using h.264 as you are. They are actually fairly smart about doing what's best for themselves, usually. If you actually studied most of the technologies in h.264, VP8, WMV, etc, you'd realize if a patent likely applies to one, would apply to them all. The open source codecs aren't all that different from the proprietary ones that they would likely escape either.

And yes, I would consider your post to be TROLLING, as it really didn't do anything but complain and spread FUD.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[JDG1980]

No one with modern hardware should need to pay any additional H.264 licensing fees, because the video hardware already supports decoding the bitstream. This has been the case for all PC video devices except the crappy Atom integrated chipset for about 5 years, and is the case with all current smartphone/tablet chipsets. The license fees were already paid by the hardware vendor. All software has to do is send the bitstream to the driver via the correct API. No use of H.264 patents in the software, no license fees.