Bug 430629

On a current x86_64 "rawhide" system, any Flash animated web page simply
exhibits a grey rectangle instead of the animation. In my case, this even
applies to simple animations or Adobe's official Falsh test page.
However, "about:plugins" definitely reports Flash support for the epiphany
browser that I am using. Installed packages:

 - epiphany-2.21.90-0.1.svn7856.fc9
 - nspluginwrapper-0.9.91.5-21.fc9
 - swfdec-mozilla-0.5.90-2.fc9
 - xulrunner-1.9-0.beta2.11.nightly20080115.fc9 [last working package]

(In reply to comment #1)
> On a current x86_64 "rawhide" system, any Flash animated web page simply
> exhibits a grey rectangle instead of the animation. In my case, this even
> applies to simple animations or Adobe's official Falsh test page.
> However, "about:plugins" definitely reports Flash support for the epiphany
> browser that I am using. Installed packages:
> 
>  - epiphany-2.21.90-0.1.svn7856.fc9
>  - nspluginwrapper-0.9.91.5-21.fc9
>  - swfdec-mozilla-0.5.90-2.fc9
>  - xulrunner-1.9-0.beta2.11.nightly20080115.fc9 [last working package]

Do you have gstreamer-ffmpeg installed?

No, gstreamer-ffmpeg is not installed but why would it when it's not
even part of "rawhide" whereas swfdec-mozilla is? Accordingly, it's
not a package that swfdec-mozilla depends on.

(In reply to comment #3)
> No, gstreamer-ffmpeg is not installed but why would it when it's not
> even part of "rawhide" whereas swfdec-mozilla is? Accordingly, it's
> not a package that swfdec-mozilla depends on.

swfdec uses gstreamer (just like totem, rhythmbox, etc), and not all the
gstreamer-plugins can be included in Fedora due to patent issues.

(In reply to comment #4)
> swfdec uses gstreamer (just like totem, rhythmbox, etc), and not all the
> gstreamer-plugins can be included in Fedora due to patent issues.

If swfdec-mozilla needs non-free 3rd party packages in order to provide
even basic functionality, then it has to be removed from Fedora and moved
to that 3rd party repository.
The current gnash-plugin package allows at least to view simple Flash
animations without sound like animated ads.

+1

(In reply to comment #5)
> If swfdec-mozilla needs non-free 3rd party packages in order to provide
> even basic functionality, then it has to be removed from Fedora and moved
> to that 3rd party repository.

By that line of thinking we would also remove totem & rhythmbox.  swfdec meets
the requirements for entry into Fedora, and will not be leaving Fedora while it
does.

(In reply to comment #7)
> By that line of thinking we would also remove totem & rhythmbox. swfdec
> meets the requirements for entry into Fedora, and will not be leaving
> Fedora while it does.

Your reasoning is entirely wrong: totem & rhythmbox are actually usable
for playing -open- formats out of the box, and this is what they were
intended for in the first place. Of course, adding proprietary codecs
allows to extend the range of supported formats even further. In the
Flash case, the situation is obviously different since it's supposed to
play a single format: Flash. If this does not even work in the simplest
cases without adding proprietary components from external repositories,
then we do have a problem.
Btw, I cannot believe that ffmpeg support is necessary to play even the
simplest Flash animation with swfdec when gnash is able to do it without,
so maybe it's time to return to a more problem oriented discussion about
why on my system any Flash animation only shows up as a grey rectangle.
Afer all it's you who came up with this rather misleading ffmpeg issue.
Given that swfdec has reached bet status, I would expect it to do better
but I haven't used it before.

(In reply to comment #8)
> Your reasoning is entirely wrong: totem & rhythmbox are actually usable
> for playing -open- formats out of the box, and this is what they were
> intended for in the first place. Of course, adding proprietary codecs
> allows to extend the range of supported formats even further. In the
> Flash case, the situation is obviously different since it's supposed to
> play a single format: Flash. If this does not even work in the simplest
> cases without adding proprietary components from external repositories,
> then we do have a problem.
>
> Btw, I cannot believe that ffmpeg support is necessary to play even the
> simplest Flash animation with swfdec when gnash is able to do it without,
> so maybe it's time to return to a more problem oriented discussion about
> why on my system any Flash animation only shows up as a grey rectangle.
> Afer all it's you who came up with this rather misleading ffmpeg issue.
> Given that swfdec has reached bet status, I would expect it to do better
> but I haven't used it before.

swfdec does work with simple flash, for example
http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/tennis/tennis.html.  gstreamer-ffmpeg is
necessary to play flash video for things like youtube.

Please in the future, if you haven't actually used the software, or know what
your talking about, refrain from spamming bugzilla.

(In reply to comment #9)
> Please in the future, if you haven't actually used the software, or know
> what your talking about, refrain from spamming bugzilla.

Thanks for being so helpful. According to comment #1, I obviously -had-
used swfdec-mozilla before posting my observation. Btw, I do very well
know what I am talking about. With a M.Sc. in physics and almost 20 years
of Unix experience and scientific computing, this should not even come as
a surprise. I only wonder what qualifies -you- to bully other Fedora
users. In the meantime, I have located the issue which led to the flash
problem reported in comment #1: due to bug 427369, I currently have to
copy plugins to my local .mozilla/plugins. Otherwise, no plugins other
than libnullplugin.so and libunixprintplugin.so get recognized. This
procedure used to work for libgnashplugin.so and other plugins, and in
order to try out swfdec, I had copied libswfdecmozilla.so to
.mozilla/plugins after removing libgnashplugin.so. After doing so, any
flash animation simply showed up as a grey rectangle. What did the trick
was not to -copy- libswfdecmozilla.so to .mozilla/plugins but to create
a symbolic link instead.
After this change, http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome renders the
test animation as expected. SELinux framework is enabled but in used in
permissive mode.

(In reply to comment #10)
> Thanks for being so helpful. According to comment #1, I obviously -had-
> used swfdec-mozilla before posting my observation. Btw, I do very well
> know what I am talking about. With a M.Sc. in physics and almost 20 years
> of Unix experience and scientific computing, this should not even come as
> a surprise. I only wonder what qualifies -you- to bully other Fedora
> users.

Then why write the following in comment #8?: "Given that swfdec has reached bet
status, I would expect it to do better but I haven't used it before." 
Truthfully, I don't want to know, since this is a bug report, and not a mailing
list, and I have *zero* interest in getting in a flame-war.

(In reply to comment #0)
> http://www.fedoratv.com - looks like it will start but it doesn't,
> just shows "buffering"

Works w/ swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0-1

> http://www.ted.com - front page isn't rendered correctly, individual
> videos just don't start

This one still doesn't work.

> http://www.youtube.com/ - you need to click on video in order to see
> controls but it works ok!

Still works fine.

> http://www.blip.tv - frontpage video works but other videos I click I
> see totem plugin loading instead of swfdec

Haven't experienced this with swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0, everything seems to work fine.

> http://video.google.com/ - audio plays with black video screen

Work fine here w/swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0.

> http://www.redtube.com NSFW - videos don't play (looks also like buffering)

Don't really care if this works or not. ;)

> http://www.metacafe.com - videos play but are wrong dimension,
> sometimes with full width but only 2 pixels high?!?

Not experiencing this w/swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0

> http://www.videojug.com - totem plugin starts instead of swfdec ?!?

Not seeing the totem-plugin being started, but swfdec doesn't appear able to
play the videos from this site.

> http://sclipo.com/ - doesn't work

Still doesn't play

> http://crackle.com - after click nothing happens, not even video
> player controls show up

Still doesn't play.

> http://www.revver.com - video plays but video is smaller that it should be

Doesn't play

> http://www.veoh.com/ - video plays but "loading" message that shows
> buffering stays overlayed over the video the whole time

Doesn't play.

> http://video.msn.com - doesn't play video

Still doesn't play.

(In reply to comment #12)
> (In reply to comment #0)
> > http://www.fedoratv.com - looks like it will start but it doesn't,
> > just shows "buffering"
> 
> Works w/ swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0-1
> 
> > http://www.ted.com - front page isn't rendered correctly, individual
> > videos just don't start
> 
> This one still doesn't work.
> 
> > http://www.youtube.com/ - you need to click on video in order to see
> > controls but it works ok!
> 
> Still works fine.

I would be careful when saying thing like that, because controls don't work and
they didn't work. So video playback is nice but that is not full functionality
of youtube site and other video sites as well.

also there are issues with more videos on one page likw this one "Top 10 Linux
Commercials":
http://www.prestigemarketinggroup.net/ideas/top-10-linux-commercials.html?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=1&Itemid=2

I can see 1-2 videos before all videos freeze and I need to reload a page. All
videos are from youtube.

Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA.
More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

OK, guys, enjoy this bug (which IMHO should be sent long time ago upstream), but
not as NEW :-).

I'm seeing this behaviour as well unfortunately.. When trying to play http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/tennis/tennis.html the swfdec apparently crashes and I see this in my .xsession-errors:

Unsupported movie property menu with value "false"
Unsupported movie property wmode with value "opaque"
Unsupported movie property quality with value "high"
Unsupported movie property pluginspage with value "http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
unhandled event 19
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** WARNING: unhandled variable 11 in NPP_GetValue()
*** NSPlugin Wrapper *** ERROR: NPP_Destroy() invoke: Connection closed
Loading stream: http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/tennis/tennis2.swf
npviewer.bin: pcm_pulse.c:296: pulse_write: Assertion `pcm->last_size >= (size * pcm->frame_size)' failed.


$ rpm -q firefox swfdec swfdec-mozilla
firefox-3.0.1-1.fc9.i386
swfdec-0.6.6-1.fc9.i386
swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0-1.fc9.i386

Hope this helps.

Here is an update:

http://www.fedoratv.com - site down?!?

http://www.ted.com - front page isn't rendered correctly, individual videos just don't start

http://www.youtube.com/ - you need to click on video in order to see controls but it works ok! Rewinding to uncached part doesn't work (it works with Adobe Flash 9 and 10 player)

http://www.blip.tv - frontpage video works but other videos I click I see totem plugin loading instead of swfdec

http://video.google.com/ - it works now.  Rewinding to uncached part doesn't work (it works with Adobe Flash 9 and 10 player)

http://www.redtube.com NSFW - videos don't play (looks also like buffering)

http://www.metacafe.com - doesn't even start.

http://www.videojug.com - it works now (but looong wait for buffering)

http://sclipo.com/ - doesn't even start

http://www.dailymotion.com - audio and video not in sync?!?

http://crackle.com - doesn't even start

http://www.revver.com - doesn't even start

http://www.veoh.com - video plays but "loading" message that shows
buffering stays overlayed over the video the whole time

http://video.msn.com - doesn't even start


tested with swfdec 0.6.0

Upstream bug:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18553

installed packages:
swfdec-mozilla-0.6.0-1.fc9.i386
swfdec-gtk-0.6.8-1.fc9.i386
swfdec-0.6.8-1.fc9.i386

Your package versions are lagging behind significantly since Rawhide is at:

  swfdec-0.9.2-1.fc11
  swfdec-mozilla-0.9.2-1.fc11

Try to rebuild the binary RPMs from the SRPMs with "rpmbuild --rebuild ..".
Otherwise file a bug requesting an update.

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we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 9 is end of life.  If you 
would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it 
against a later version of Fedora please change the 'version' of this 
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Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
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The process we are following is described here: 
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This is still an "active" bug.

This bug wont be fixed by upstream. Because they are in maintenance mode.
They will don´t develop new features.