The third alpha release of Gnash has just been made at version
0.8.0. Gnash is a GPL'd Flash movie player and browser plugin for
Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Gnash supports many SWF v7
features and ActionScript2 classes. Gnash also runs on many GNU/Linux
distributions, embedded GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, non x86
processors, and 64 bit architectures. Ports to Darwin and Windows are
in progress for a future release. The plugin works best with Firefox
1.0.4 or newer, and should work in any Mozilla based browser. There is
also a standalone player for GNOME or KDE based desktops.
Improvements since the 0.7.2 alpha release are:
* Streaming video works with YouTube and Lulu.tv! This has been the
focus for the majority of the time since the last release.
* Many core improvements in the VM as our understanding of Flash
improves. These all improve both the correctness of a movie that is
being played, but enables more movies to play that used to not work.
* New FLTK2 gui support added.
* Simple Flash debugger added.
* Improved Darwin support that can use the system OpenGL.
* Flash extensions, direct support for file handling, MySQL access,
etc.. through plugins to the Gnash VM. Wrappers for any C/C++ API
libraries can be exported into ActionScript, and used as native
commands in a Flash movie.
* Many new testcases! Support for testing with ming, swfmill, and
mtasc compilers.
* New drawing API for MovieClips..
* Updated manuals.
Gnash supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and
a wide sampling of ActionScript classes for SWF version 8.5. All the
core ones are implemented, and many of the newer ones work, but may be
missing some of their methods. If the browser only displays a blank
window, it is likely because of an unimplemented feature. All
unimplemented opcodes and ActionScript classes and methods print a
warning when using -v with gnash or gprocessor. Using gprocessor -v is
a quick way to see why a movie isn't playing correctly.
You can grab the Gnash sources from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnash/,
or from Gnash CVS with the tag "release_0_8_0". Binary packages for