Adobe Flash?

Qyöt27

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My preference for MPlayer reaches back quite a long time, to when VLC was a lot more unwieldy than it is now. But despite VLC greatly improving over the past 12-13 years or so, it still only exposes a select number of formats to decode (notably, VLC doesn't allow for playing back AviSynth scripts, even though libavformat has been capable of it in some form for close to a decade), Qt is a resource drain, and the process for compiling VLC from source is awful. I've done it a couple times so I could test VLMC on Linux; it's not fun.

mpv (which is very likely the most actively developed of the members of the MPlayer camp), on the other hand, exposes all of the formats that the FFmpeg libraries can decode, its main method of launch is still from the CLI and therefore usually still lacks the GUI toolkit overhead, and it's pretty simple and straightforward to compile.
 
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paul1149

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Ok thanks. I just tried mpv here in LinuxLite, through the official repository, and came up with no control panel in it at all. And Baka is missing a necessary library, so it won't install, so that's out too. I compared the rendering and thought I saw a bit of an advantage to mpv over VLC, but not enough to override the inconvenience from my point of view.
 
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Qyöt27

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Well, mpv does have an on-screen controller triggered by mouse movement, so if you have video files associated with mpv by default, then it should just pop up when you click on the video. Although I've never tried doing it that way since I just launch it through the Terminal.

For most users on Linux I'd go with finding a PPA that provides the necessary stuff. Linux Lite looks like an Ubuntu derivative, so if it can accept PPAs, this one has baka-mplayer plus mpv with libmpv enabled (since I assume it was libmpv it was missing).
 
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paul1149

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Thanks again. I used the right-click, Open with mpv player command, to open the video, but nothing I did made the controller manifest. I did come across that PPA source, but its ubuntu version doesn't match the core of linuxlite that I'm using, so at that point I decided it wasn't worth the effort.
 
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MrJim

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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.


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.


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.

Well see some of us have the mentality that Adobe owns .pdf so it's a "must have" software....my education continues :)
 
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Aviela

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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? :D

Yup...basically what I was going to post. Latest is that with the new adobe flash update mozilla is allowing flash again. :D I uninstalled it but had to reinstall so I could access some research I needed to view. If there is another way to view these files...I'd like to know. I guess it depends but so far I've not seen it. For instance youtube videos etc. idk...
 
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inlight12

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Yup...basically what I was going to post. Latest is that with the new adobe flash update mozilla is allowing flash again. :D I uninstalled it but had to reinstall so I could access some research I needed to view. If there is another way to view these files...I'd like to know. I guess it depends but so far I've not seen it. For instance youtube videos etc. idk...

Flash is proprietary format and there is little chance that anyone other than adobe can successfully make a plug-in for flash due to this. So you don't have much chance there. But I why would a modern site depend on such buggy and replaceable technology escapes me. Do them a favor and tell them to use something other than flash. Also if the file is saved in your computer as opposed to an web stream, you don't need flash to view them.
 
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Aviela

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Flash is proprietary format and there is little chance that anyone other than adobe can successfully make a plug-in for flash due to this. So you don't have much chance there. But I why would a modern site depend on such buggy and replaceable technology escapes me. Do them a favor and tell them to use something other than flash. Also if the file is saved in your computer as opposed to an web stream, you don't need flash to view them.
Yup. :) and ok thanks. :)
 
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