Flash Support


Brotasmo

Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2010
Messages
74
I know this probably has been discussed the hell out of, but does the Pandora support online flash media (videos) such as ones on youtube?
 
You are right, it has been discussed the hell out of. Please search.
 
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A quick summary: Flash is not supported. Youtube, however, does have some support through the viewer Minitube.
Even quicker summary: Flash, no; Youtube, yes.
 
More accurate summary: flash, sort of; youtube, definitely.
There is a flash plugin, but it's very beta, and very slow. It's good for some vector animated videos, some low demand games, but not streaming video yet. It's also not installed by default, you need to contact Texas Instruments to get a copy of it. There hasn't been any updates to it in months though, so I'm not certain what TI are planning to do with it.
 
WizardStan said:
More accurate summary: flash, sort of; youtube, definitely.
There is a flash plugin, but it's very beta, and very slow. It's good for some vector animated videos, some low demand games, but not streaming video yet. It's also not installed by default, you need to contact Texas Instruments to get a copy of it. There hasn't been any updates to it in months though, so I'm not certain what TI are planning to do with it.
Whats with all that News from Adobe that they do a ARM Flash Support? Just Marketing or just not working for the Pandora? I can't imagine that even Adobe can't do a fast and 100% working Flash Player for ARM Devices. So whats taking so long onto this little 2MB plugin to make it work like it works onto x86 PC's? :blink:
 
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fusion_power said:
WizardStan said:
More accurate summary: flash, sort of; youtube, definitely.
There is a flash plugin, but it's very beta, and very slow. It's good for some vector animated videos, some low demand games, but not streaming video yet. It's also not installed by default, you need to contact Texas Instruments to get a copy of it. There hasn't been any updates to it in months though, so I'm not certain what TI are planning to do with it.
Whats with all that News from Adobe that they do a ARM Flash Support? Just Marketing or just not working for the Pandora? I can't imagine that even Adobe can't do a fast and 100% working Flash Player for ARM Devices. So whats taking so long onto this little 2MB plugin to make it work like it works onto x86 PC's? :blink:

Adobe distribute 2 differents flash for arm :
1) for Meamo. this is a version 9 plugin. It depend on about 80% of the whole meamo stack. It could made to work but that mean building a browser with a different libc we are currently using on pandora and creating a library that fake all the maemo call this plugin use. Large work, painfull. But doable.
2) for android. This is a version 10 plugin.This one depend on the android NDK stack. The hard part seems to be the special threading android is using (beside their weird libc...). hdonk had worked on this. His effort goes far imho, but he seems to have stopped his project somehow

Then there is the ARM plugin wizardStan told us in this thread.
 
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fusion_power said:
Whats with all that News from Adobe that they do a ARM Flash Support? Just Marketing or just not working for the Pandora?
Marketing, mostly. It isn't "ARM" support, so much as "Android" support. It wasn't a generic ARM Linux solution, but specifically targeted at Android phones with ARM processors. Someone was working on getting the Android version running on the Pandora, but it had so much dependency they were practically pulling in the entire Android OS.
Texas Instruments licensed Adobe's code and started working on a generic ARM Linux port, but it as said, it hasn't been updated in months, so they may have abandoned it.

fusion_power said:
I can't imagine that even Adobe can't do a fast and 100% working Flash Player for ARM Devices. So whats taking so long onto this little 2MB plugin to make it work like it works onto x86 PC's? :blink:
Why is that so unbelievable? How long have 64 bit systems been growing in popularity, and they STILL don't have a proper 64 bit x86 solution. I imagine Adobe will get around to finishing the ARM11 sometime around when the ARM18 spec is released, and the 64 bit desktop version should be ready shortly after 256bit computing becomes the norm. :p
 
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money makes the world stop spinning and letting it become better
 
WizardStan said:
Why is that so unbelievable? How long have 64 bit systems been growing in popularity, and they STILL don't have a proper 64 bit x86 solution.
If you take a look at the betas and preview releases of the last few years, it looks like they even fail at keeping the 64bit version within the same development branch: Recently they released that 10.2 beta release, but what about the 64bit version? Instead of releasing that one as well we just got a 3rd revision of the previous 10.1 "Square" preview release.
How much did they mess up the code that it has to be done like that?
 
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Just to add where I go with a wrapper for the Android version to the thread - I got the shared library up and running, and linked in to Firefox. However at that point there are a lot of dependencies within the plugin on Android OS related stuff, so I was writing a shim to convert those calls in to something sensible. It only got so far before TI's alpha release was mooted, and at that point I felt there was no reason to continue. I suspect if TI don't do a full/optimised release I'll start going again.
Also I'm waiting for my repaired Pandora :)

Edit: Corrected style.
 
When big companies can't (or won't in case of Apple) do a propper Flash version for ARM devices, I doubt we will see something usable soon, at least not what could play all my beloved Flash based Tower Defense Games full speed onto the Pandora. ^^"

Well, I actualy don't like Flash. But somehow everyone seems to use it. :D I hope Youtube & Co. will use something better than Flash one day, I don't know how well HTML 5 based Videos/Games could perform onto the Pandora but it's better than nothing I guess.
 
It's also possible the TI flash plugin didn't run so well is because it has dsp optimizations that it can't take advantage of yet, similar to what mplayer has (if I understood correctly). Maybe upgrading to a newer kernel will help there, too. I don't know that for sure though, and a new kernel is still some time away.
 
Hi,

WebM

Last time I tried WebM videos on the Pandora it didn't work :( Is someone working on it ?

Gnash

I don't know if some dev give Gnash a go, maybe it could be useful ?

Bye, Magic Sam
 
Magic Sam said:
Hi,

WebM

Last time I tried WebM videos on the Pandora it didn't work :( Is someone working on it ?

Gnash

I don't know if some dev give Gnash a go, maybe it could be useful ?

Bye, Magic Sam

Don't forget Lightspark.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/lightspark
 
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Lightspark is very, very, x86 optimized and from a cursory glance would require so much rewriting you may as well start from scratch.
I tried getting gnash working, and had some success with the standalone player, but it was still very slow, slower than the same files run through the TI plugin. I couldn't get the gnash plugin to work to test youtube though: it would play sound (which has no problem anywhere) but the spot where the plugin should be displaying something is blank. Shortly after trying, TI released their plugin which made it moot. As like hdonk, if TI doesn't make any progress on their plugin, I may pick up Gnash again to at least get it stable.
 
What are you folks using Flash for, mostly? I've tried to figure out what I would need it for, and there isn't much really, when you remove Youtube. And you can forget worrying about Youtube as far as Flash is concerned. I've tested the HTML5 version of Youtube on my N900, and it works perfectly. Less load on the device too, much less. We'll get HTML5 support on the Pandora with Firefox version 4.
 
Tor said:
What are you folks using Flash for, mostly? I've tried to figure out what I would need it for, and there isn't much really, when you remove Youtube. And you can forget worrying about Youtube as far as Flash is concerned. I've tested the HTML5 version of Youtube on my N900, and it works perfectly. Less load on the device too, much less. We'll get HTML5 support on the Pandora with Firefox version 4.

Doesn't HTML5 youtube work in Chromium?
 
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It should. Also with the beta of firefox 4. But it doesn't from my expirience.
 
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