Slow but functional: 3D rally racing using the new BitmapData code (for Gnash 0.8.9).

The release of Gnash 0.8.8 met with a generally favourable response. Here are a couple of more detailed reviews:

• http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/08/gnash-088-a-huge-improvement-o.html
• http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/gnash-088-claims-to-support-all-youtube.html

Six months ago I published a list of possible improvements for Gnash 0.8.8. The list was:

1. Reliable text handling.
2. BitmapData draw() function.
3. RTMP.
4. Dynamic focal gradients, gradient spread and interpolation modes.
5. Playback of obfuscated SWFs.
6. Direct conversion of SWF to video using ffmpeg.

The bad news first: only one of the list made it into 0.8.8. This was the gradient item, where focal gradients and spread modes are now implemented.

The release of Gnash 0.8.8 brings various improvements to rendering, ActionScript execution, compatibility, and flexibility.

But the most significant change is more of a removal than an addition: Gnash no longer has any AVM2 code. AVM2, the ActionScript Virtual Machine introduced in the Flash player 9, is increasingly used in new Flash movies.

It was becoming clear that the original implementation (started in about 2006) of the newer ActionScript Virtual Machine was fundamentally flawed. So fundamentally that it was obstructing code for the old virtual machine without any benefit to Gnash at all.

Gnash features in the Safe Surfing CD distributed free by the German Computer BILD magazine.

The safety organization TÜV Rheinland and the Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) were involved in the CD's development.

Gnash is now completely compilable and optimizable with the LLVM frontend Clang. The AGG renderer headers have one C++ bug that causes an error. This needs to be fixed externally if you want to use that renderer, as it seems legitimate for a compiler to reject it (even if GCC doesn't).

Clang has already helped to find a few bugs in Gnash. Some warnings picked up things that GCC missed. And most interestingly, there were cases where Gnash's behaviour was relying on the order of evaluating function arguments.

Now Gnash is part Adobe Flash's rich developer ecosystem ...

The page, "the Truth about Flash", claims:

Finally, the Flash Platform has a rich developer ecosystem of both open and proprietary tools and technologies, including developer IDEs and environments such as FDT, IntelliJ, and haXe; open source runtimes such as Gnash; and open source video servers such as Red5.
[2010-05-17]

See a YouTube video of Gnash running on a cortex-A8 board (courtesy of Daniel Amor Martin).

The news that the BBC has started "encrypting" its RTMP streams came, in one of those coincidences, just as I'd decided to work on adding RTMP support to Gnash. So even when Gnash's RTMP video streaming works, it will still be legally difficult, if not impossible, for licence fee payers who care about software freedom to use the BBC's iPlayer.

A blog post on Gnash by Drascus drew my attention to megavideo.com, a rather ad-heavy but featureful video site that, unlike YouTube, works well in Gnash.