3 Replies to “BSD and Flash”

1. Actually, mircomedia already released a flashplayer for a bsd-based system called macosx.

   What is absolutely uninteresting about it ?

   1) Running the linux version with COMPAT_LINUX on *BSD/i386 on a Pentium with 130 MHz is about as fast as the native macosx version on a G4 with altivec.

   2) Flash and SWF is already obsolete! the product with a future is the flash authoring environment. Have it for Linux ? I bet not…

   In the meanwhile, have a look at the mozilla svg project if you are interested in what is really comming to *BSD;

2. While it’d almost be nice to think us desktop users could avoid Macromedia’s screwiness entirely… I’ll let you be the one to go around replacing every single piece of legacy SWF content with the SVG equivalent.

   (Meanwhile, I haven’t kept up, but it’s been pointed out to me that the basic flat-text representation of SVG can be dangerously… far from small. I’m not sure if tokenized/compressed variants are already on the way, and there’s always mod_gzip… but if it’ll take a Blu-Ray disc — or as likely, proprietary Macromedia compression — to hold an episode of Homestar Runner, there’s going to be a problem with adoption in the near term.)

   That said, I expect they were hoping they could ride that sea change without having to support any more architectures for free. (Only Win/Lin x86 and two flavors of MacPPC are supported publically, but don’t forget the work they must be doing to support the mobile market… and wonder how much of that can be profitable, since they *are* struggling to maintain the relevance of their crossplatform promise.)

   But there is a way out… All they really have to do is support linuxpluginwrapper development (and portability) to make life Good Enough in the transition. That project’s matured enough to make Flash 6 (on FreeBSD) a no-brainer, but it’s a shame it can’t support what seems to be the quite performance-improved Flash 7. (I had no luck running 7 under 5.2’s Linuxulator, either, so drawing Macromedia attention there could give ‘BSD’ a greater boost — broader Linux API support in general — for potentially less effort.)

3. It’s such a shame BSD users (apart from OS X) continue to be ignored by Macromedia. Oh well.

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