Re: [Gnash-dev] Gnash 0.8.2 on OLPC XO?

[Rob Savoye]

Keith Kie wrote:
>
> I am a Linux newbie and was wondering if 0.8.2 will be included in
> OLPC's "Update.1"

  I believe so, I can check with Dennis who builds the packages for the
XO at OLPC. I'm also an OLPC developer.

> If not, is there a simple way we can install the newest version of
> Gnash? (yum install etc?)

  Yes, I do this all the time. Most any build of Gnash for Fedora 7 or
Fedora 8 works, especially if you statically link some things that
aren't usually installed on the XO, like Boost.

> YouTube performance has been a pivotal issue for the OLPC project (even
> though 3rd world children probably won't be using it) adults have been
> very critical of it, due to "seemingly poor performance". Flash based
> educational sites have also become a "flash point" of debate to purchase
> or not (when compared to Intel's Classmate PC running Windows).

  Actually, as far as I can tell it's not poor performance of YouTube,
it's that it doesn't work at all. :-( This is because the OLPC can't
ship proprietary codecs like FLV and MP3, which are required by YouTube.
For the XO, Gnash is built using Gstreamer, so codecs can be added later
using the Gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin to Gst. The problem here is Gstreamer
is very sensitive to the version, so the plugin you can grab from Livna
for Fedora often doesn't work. It mostly only works when everything is
compiled at the same time.

  Most of my builds I use ffmpeg instead of Gstreamer on the XO, and
YouTube works great, with even better performance than the other player.
Course I can't redistribute it that way without violating US laws, so
the same problem exists. Multimedia codecs is a big issue these days.

> I don't want to sound extreme, but it seems the fate of worldwide
> open-source education hangs in the balance of the development of a
> successful flash player.

  We'd sure appreciate more support. We're a handful of developers...
Everyone seems to prefer to just bitch about this than help us do
something about it... Rather than helping the Gnash team make faster
progress, most people just go "Oh, they'll never catch up, lets just use
Adobe".

        - rob -