Gnash – The FOSS Shockwave flash player
When I say “shockwave flash” people usually do not understand it. This is not the flash movies you find on youtube (.flv); these are .SWF files which works as animations, programs (ex: some games & programs you play in net). As Macromedia (now owned by Adobe) has 100% successful players for these, they are not open source! And i’m afraid they can’t play standalone flash programs (.exe) created for Windows in Linux ! (and Gnash can)
Gnash 0.8.3 playing torpedojoe.exe on FC9
Gnash player evolved from the GameSWF, and now is the only active FOSS flash player project.
Gnash features (Version 0.8.3 which I have),
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Plays SWF up to version 7
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Plays .exe standalone SWF up to V7
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Has plugins for Firefox and Konqueror
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Plays some .flv files
And many exporting functions which i’m not used to that much. Click here to go to their homepage.
Installing
Gnash has .rpm packages for Fedora,Mandriva, Suse. It can be simply installed by (when you’re root)
yum install gnash
I have seen some .deb packages in the net, so ubuntu,mint,debian users can have a try
sudo apt-get gnash
For installing from the source, you can download the source for version 0.8.5 here. After untaring the file, typing
./configure
make
make install will do the job, for more information on how to compile from source click here.
After installing, you can use command
gnash <filename> to run a file
just typing gnash only will give you the command -flags help, which is very helpful for using powerful gnash command line functions. I’m not going to fill the space up here with them.
Platforms
Gnash can render SWF on 3 different libraries. Default is the agg, which has the best quality and bug free output — but this may make it little bit slow, and requires some dependencies. (as the agg itself). Anyway, if you have a good VGA card and 100% working drivers, you may go for opengl. Just use
–enable-renderer=opengl when configuring (ex: ./configure –enable-renderer=opengl)
Same manner cairo can be used –enable-renderer=cairo
By default, gnash uses Gstreamer framework (Click about on Totem to see what you have) which is the most efficient. But you can use
–enable-media=ffmpeg
if you have ffmpeg and SDL libraries installed. (This is not recommended).
