Adobe Flash?

Apparently it's a vulnerable piece of software, and not worth keeping enabled. I have it disabled now in Firefox, and most sites seem to work fine without it.

Uninstall this virus. Too bad Windows comes with it by default.

There was a news article to do with this will see if I can find it again. Apparently Mozilla felt that it was too vulerable to have on its product so it has disabled it.

Flash, per se, is being replaced by html5. I think abobe is still involved at root, but control is being shifted over to the browser, which is a good thing.

I got a video sent by my sister by email, just the other day, that wouldn't run because Adobe flash player wasn't enabled (had disabled it following advice about a display video graphics glitch) so enabled it; video ran no problem. I had finally downloaded the latest Adobe updates, a week or so ago, and why is Adobe so huge!; 480MB in the x reader and almost one GB in the flash player; no wonder it is easy to hack. I have, in addition to windows media player, QuickTime player, and Realplayer; can't any of these run flash videos?

Edit: I looked up Quick time and it does support flash videos; I suppose it's all what is the default player set up on my PC; even in Win7 it's not easy to set up some other player besides Windows.

The flash player is "only" about 16MB if I recall. Most flash files are .flv I think, and VLC runs them fine off the desktop. Maybe you could save the file first?

paul1149 said:

The flash player is "only" about 16MB if I recall. Most flash files are .flv I think, and VLC runs them fine off the desktop. Maybe you could save the file first?

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When I updated Adobe it had 960MB in the total download file; when I look at the file in windows it doesn't show any, so it must be hidden. VLC is a Linux program; I believe, I don't have it on Win7. Adobe has been working fine in this machine for over 3 years and for decades in others; I think I will hang-on to it. It's like Windows; there is so much panic and alarm going around; needlessly for the most part. Firefox has it's own issues.

MrJim said:

Reading lots of news~Mozilla blocking it on Firefox....what's the scoop folks?

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They still allow you to enable flash if needed, I understand but it has become a pain in the behind so I switched to Palemoon which is based off FF and is pretty good now. (I used it before and was not as polished then to me)

mnorian said:

When I updated Adobe it had 960MB in the total download file; when I look at the file in windows it doesn't show any, so it must be hidden. VLC is a Linux program; I believe

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Could it have been KBs? Adobe uses a stub installer of about that size, and keeps the main installer on its site. It also automatically deletes the stub when the install is done, which might explain you not seeing it?

VLC is multiplatform, BTW. I've been using it here on Windows for years as my main AV player.

paul1149 said:

The flash player is "only" about 16MB if I recall. Most flash files are .flv I think, and VLC runs them fine off the desktop. Maybe you could save the file first?

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Ya, the new Adobe active x flash player is 17.1MB so it was Shockwave that is listed without the file size; but their Reader x is 483MB

paul1149 said:

Could it have been KBs? Adobe uses a stub installer of about that size, and keeps the main installer on its site. It also automatically deletes the stub when the install is done, which might explain you not seeing it?

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No it was MB; it surprised me so much I paused the download and looked at it; but this was with the reader and flash player combined; right at 500MB, and cause I was looking at it
before it was installed; I must have been looking at the old and new files combined somehow; before the installer deleted the old stuff. Or maybe Shockwave is so huge they keep the size hidden; I don't use it for games.

I'm not the only one, wondering about the size of Adobe:

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...umes-mass-quantities-of-hard-drive-space.html

MrJim said:

Reading lots of news~Mozilla blocking it on Firefox....what's the scoop folks?

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Flush plugin security hole is detected. Mozilla blocks flush plugin and waits. Adobe fixes flush. Mozilla enables again. Holes detected. Mozilla blocks flush plugin and waits. Adobe fixes flush. Mozilla enables again. Holes detected. Mozilla blocks flush plugin and waits.

If you were Mozilla, how would you feel?

MrJim said:

Flash has been around forever it seems~~what will not work if it is gone? I know occasionally I stumble across a site with the iPod Touch that won't work because it requires flash but that is rare.

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Many interactive things like flash games, banking websites (maybe), product websites using demonstrations, hotel websites using shining flash gimmicks etc. Right now I can say armorgames will definitely not work. www.armorgames.com

mnorian said:

I got a video sent by my sister by email, just the other day, that wouldn't run because Adobe flash player wasn't enabled (had disabled it following advice about a display video graphics glitch) so enabled it; video ran no problem. I had finally downloaded the latest Adobe updates, a week or so ago, and why is Adobe so huge!; 480MB in the x reader and almost one GB in the flash player; no wonder it is easy to hack.

Click to expand...

Latest Adobe Flash Player plugin (PPAPI) is only 18.3 MB and is just a single file which only runs flash content in Web Browsers. You must have other things from Adobe to get so huge download.

I have, in addition to windows media player, QuickTime player, and Realplayer; can't any of these run flash videos?

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No. The encoding format is different. It would be like plugging in telephone wires to TV and trying to play it on TV.

paul1149 said:

Most flash files are .flv I think, and VLC runs them fine off the desktop. Maybe you could save the file first?

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Nopes. The file flash plays is an "swf" file designed using Adobe Macromedia Design Suite. This file contains a function of a video player and some animations. It uses the address as an input and gets the location of the movie in the server, streams it to your browser temp cache and plays it to you without disclosing the location of the movie.

Think of it this way. C:\...\flash\flashplugin.dll + youtube.com/player.swf, together is equal to VLC.exe . Both plays flv file (the actual movie file) like a projector projects the camera reels on a screen. The player itself is not the movie. What you see is only the player.swf with play and pause buttons.

inlight12 said:

Latest Adobe Flash Player plugin (PPAPI) is only 18.3 MB and is just a single file which only runs flash content in Web Browsers. You must have other things from Adobe to get so huge download.

No. The encoding format is different. It would be like plugging in telephone wires to TV and trying to play it on TV.

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Check my answers to Paul1149.

Here's a link from askleo about Flash:

https://askleo.com/flash-not-flash-thats-good-question/?awt_l=9Xlrc&awt_m=J7tH09kyZJdfbL

There's no reason to use Adobe Reader for PDF files. None. PDF was made into an open standard years ago and there's many more programs that can handle them now (and render them faster, with miniscule resource footprints). Sumatra PDF, for example.

inlight12 said:

mnorian said:

I have, in addition to windows media player, QuickTime player, and Realplayer; can't any of these run flash videos?

Click to expand...

No. The encoding format is different. It would be like plugging in telephone wires to TV and trying to play it on TV.

Click to expand...

Wrong (well, except for Quicktime, but not because it's impossible). All three of those players rely on existing frameworks to handle video decoding. WMP uses Media Foundation and DirectShow (formerly/maybe still uses Video for Windows), in that order, and as far as I ever knew, the later versions of RealPlayer (seriously, why?) are also DirectShow-based. All someone needs to do is install LAV Filters and voila, Flash Video support (although getting it to take priority in WMP may mean using the DirectShow Tweaker Tool to force its merit higher).

And yes, 'Flash Video' refers to *.flv, although the name refers to two different container formats: its original incarnation is derived from SWF's container format, whereas the second form (technically, F4V, but usually still found with *.flv as the file extension) is basically an ISO Base Media file. The difference is in which formats are stored in them: anything with H.264 in it is the ISO Base Media-ish one, files with VP6 or Sorenson Spark in them are the SWF-ish one. Quicktime is also a framework by which support for extra formats can be added, but the Windows distribution of Quicktime was/is generally awful and never had the more useful components ported to it, so even if Perian or whatever successor it has now could feasibly do it, Windows users are usually left out in the cold.

Anything that uses the libraries from FFmpeg can feasibly play back almost anything. LAV Filters (and ffdshow before it) do/did this within DirectShow, Perian did it within Quicktime. VLC and the MPlayer family use the libraries standalone. All of them use libavcodec and libavformat, and sometimes the other libraries, to a greater (LAV Filters, MPlayer family) or lesser (ffdshow, VLC, Perian) extent.

I'd generally recommend any of the MPlayer family over VLC though. Preferably mpv. Those that need a GUI can use Baka MPlayer.

inlight12 said:

Nopes. The file flash plays is an "swf" file designed using Adobe Macromedia Design Suite. This file contains a function of a video player and some animations. It uses the address as an input and gets the location of the movie in the server, streams it to your browser temp cache and plays it to you without disclosing the location of the movie.

Click to expand...

Oh, it does disclose it. There's no way to transmit the information without knowing where it comes from. They just don't make it easy to find the information - oftentimes it's behind multiple layers of obfuscation and cryptographic hoops incurred by the maze of files that the player VM relies on, but it is there. Otherwise there wouldn't be programs that explicitly offer direct download or playback access to the files by decoding the information the SWF layer sends, with or without the use of RTMP.

This is largely why you could have extensions for the browser replacing the web-based video players on websites (very often Flash, but not universally) with MPlayer and have it actually still work.

Qyöt27 said:

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Qyot, I always love your contributions, though I understand maybe 5% of them. Just a couple of thoughts.

I was using and installing Sumatra PDF reader for a couple of years, and love it. It's especially good on netbooks. But I found that pdf-xchange is nearly as fast, and affords a full complement of functionality, such as form-filling, so I've switched back to it. I prefer as little adobe on the machine as possible.

Is your preference for mplayer due to rendering? I thought I noticed some differences.