Friday, January 19, 2007

Linux and Flash 9

Arg! Adobe just came out with version 9 of their Flash player for Linux. I installed it on a couple of my Debian GNU/Linux boxes and found that it is still unreliable for me. I had been using the beta version of 9, and reported this problem to one of the Flash developers. I hoped the problem would get fixed, but nope.

The problem is that while playing a Flash stream, such as a video from YouTube, the playback will often just quit at random spots in the playback. There's no way to get the playback started up again except to reload the page and start from scratch. This gets mighty painful on longer videos.

I can tell I'd like the version 9 player better than the version 7 player, if it worked! As it is, I've written a script allowing me to quickly switch between the two versions. I use 9 for most things, but switch to 7 when playing a longer video and suffering from this problem.

Bummer. Maybe the next version will work.

BTW, I never really have liked Flash. It's always felt "klunky" to me, even on Windows and Macintosh. It's just that so many web developers seem to be enamored of it that you miss out on a lot of content if you don't have it.

1 comment:

Nathan R. Hale said...

I had the same prob with 9 beta, but it seems to be resolved in the 9 final on Ubuntu Edgy.