Adobe Flash

[ora]

Hi ,


I need some help getting flash player (or alternative) to work so I can use websites such as Youtube.


I noticed some posts mentioning some alternatives but with little success.


I also noticed someone recommending Firefox 4 , but that didn't help.(Tried both Firefox 10 beta from APP store although help -> About says it's just 3.63 , and I even tried the mobile version Firefox Fennec but still no luck )


I even downloaded the tar.gz file from adobe but it gave me an error and failed to install.(

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Minitube works fine for youtube.


http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=minitube

 

[diligentcircle]

Flash is flimsy at best, but your best bet is with Midori (Firefox crashes too much). You need to find a file called libflashplayer.so and put it into appdata/midori/plugins. I've seen people say you need to rename it to "adobeflashplayer.so", but that doesn't seem to be the case for the current version of Midori.


The one thing about this file: it needs to be the ARM version and that's not what you'll normally find on the internet, so the easiest way to find it is to download the latest Firefox and copy it from /mnt/utmp/{firefox directory}/lib/firefox-{version}/plugins while Firefox is running. You also may have been able to infer from that that the Firefox PND includes Flash, but my experience with it has been that it crashes too much.


You can get the latest versions of Firefox and Midori from the repo (repo.openpandora.org) if you didn't know that.


Like I said, Flash is flimsy at best. It can play YouTube videos at 240p, but it's a bit of a low frame rate (so you won't see everything in a video that has a ton of movement). It doesn't seem to work with Blip.tv videos (it always spits out that the video is unavailable) and while it seems to work with most flash games, they almost invariably are too slow to be any fun. Flash videos (e.g. what you would find on Newgrounds) seem to be fine, though (albeit sometimes too tall for the Pandora's screen; zooming out can be helpful in these situations).


What I personally would really like is for YouTube's HTML5 video player to work, but it doesn't seem to work on any of the browsers that can run on the Pandora. I don't know about other video sharing sites' HTML5 players, though.

 

[Neelix]

I also noticed someone recommending Firefox 4 , but that didn't help.(Tried both Firefox 10 beta from APP store although help -> About says it's just 3.63 , and I even tried the mobile version Firefox Fennec but still no luck )

That tends to happen if you have more than one firefox PND that the PND system can see... regardless of which one you tell it to run it will always load the first one it finds. If you want to try the latest beta, you need to hide all the other firefox PNDs by moving them to another folder on the SD card (ie not the root folder and not one of the /pandora/xxxxxxx sub-folders) or deleting them altogether.


- Neelix

 

[milkshake]

actually the later versions of firefox very rarely crash if at all, and they come with flash pre-installed by accident of course

 

[lomaxx]

Unfortunately flash is not hardware-accelerated and mostly unusable slow within browsers. I made myself a setup where Minitube downloads to a special folder and and watch them with panplayer. Well, at least with the mplayer-binary that comes with panplayer, which I included into some python-launcher.

 

[Neelix]

actually the later versions of firefox very rarely crash if at all, and they come with flash pre-installed by accident of course

Even the earlier versions were quite stable if you you had some swap space set up.

Unfortunately flash is not hardware-accelerated and mostly unusable slow within browsers. I made myself a setup where Minitube downloads to a special folder and and watch them with panplayer. Well, at least with the mplayer-binary that comes with panplayer, which I included into some python-launcher.

I would have to agree with that point. I could play a video at an acceptable speed once I changed the resolution to 240p. Unfortunately I was never able to find a way to do that without first starting the video at 360p which slowed things to a crawl...


- Neelix

 

[diligentcircle]

actually the later versions of firefox very rarely crash if at all, and they come with flash pre-installed by accident of course

I dunno, I rarely use Firefox, but it seems to crash at least as much as Midori. It's particularly a problem when Flash is being used.


EDIT: I just used Firefox for a bit and remembered: It's not crashes that makes it annoying to use, it's that you can't sign into Google Accounts. What use is YouTube if you can't see your subscriptions? But it definitely does seem like it crashes more (happened twice in maybe a half hour, first on Yahoo and then on the YouTube homepage), and it also seems like it's slower than Midori. In any case, Flash itself is fine, but not being able to log into YouTube is no small setback.

 

[numidark]

All video flash in 240p work fine on firefox 8.0 on Pandora.


It just have to make a plugin for the 240p to automatically on Youtube, Dailymotion, etc


And solve the problem of fullscreen

 

[hdonk]

actually the later versions of firefox very rarely crash if at all, and they come with flash pre-installed by accident of course

I dunno, I rarely use Firefox, but it seems to crash at least as much as Midori. It's particularly a problem when Flash is being used.


EDIT: I just used Firefox for a bit and remembered: It's not crashes that makes it annoying to use, it's that you can't sign into Google Accounts. What use is YouTube if you can't see your subscriptions? But it definitely does seem like it crashes more (happened twice in maybe a half hour, first on Yahoo and then on the YouTube homepage), and it also seems like it's slower than Midori. In any case, Flash itself is fine, but not being able to log into YouTube is no small setback.

Actually, you can sign in to Google Accounts, you just have to browse to about:config, and set 'security.enable_tls' to false.

 

[diligentcircle]

Actually, you can sign in to Google Accounts, you just have to browse to about:config, and set 'security.enable_tls' to false.

I see. So why isn't it false by default? Does it cause problems or something?

 

[sukhi2011]

All video flash in 240p work fine on firefox 8.0 on Pandora.


It just have to make a plugin for the 240p to automatically on Youtube, Dailymotion, etc


And solve the problem of fullscreen

I 100% agree with you for saying 240p automatically on youtube and solve the full screen problem plus the redline which shows in each video everytime,which is so annoying to look at in the top left.

 

[milkshake]

the red line cant be avoided im afriad its how adobe show its a beta version.

 

[DrKlaw]

There is a CLI package called "get_flash_videos" that you can install if you are using PanDebian. This works well to download flash videos from a bunch of websites. Once you have them, you can use mplayer to view them. The problem I have with doing this, however, is that if the video is fairly large, my WiFi cuts out before it all comes down. (This WiFi issue is discussed elsewhere.) There is also the DownloadHelper plug-in for firefox, but I haven't used that much.