Libflashplayer.so

[silverspring]

Despite what others might say, I personally believe that getting flash working will be vital to the success of the Pandora. Don't get me wrong, Pandora won't die if it doesn't get flash, but it would certainly stunt it's growth, popularity and functionality. I really hope this port is successful. I already wrote to Adobe requesting official support for flash on the Pandora, but they never even got back to me - so it looks like we'll need to move things forward by ourselves. Thankfully we have a talented and resourceful bunch, and I wish you all good luck and success.

I think you might be right about the flash. Another thing that must be sorted is the wifi. Unfortunately it feels like a lot of devs have already given up on the Pandora and moved on to other projects. The excessive delays in getting the Pandora out early was frustrating, and now we have a project that is literally moving at a snails pace. Coming up are ipad alternatives based on android (that can only get better and better), not to mention devices such as exopc which is based on win 7 but which will have a lovely UI allowing excellent touch screen functionality.

I wasn't much a fan of the ipad idea when it was first presented, but it has really grown on me. The ipad itself is imo overpriced and crippled by Apple, but I can easily see myself using a similar device based on android with USB ports, card slots etc for reading pdf's in portrait mode. Not to mention the lovely experience you gain from browsing the web on such devices.

 

[urjaman]

I think you might be right about the flash. Another thing that must be sorted is the wifi. Unfortunately it feels like a lot of devs have already given up on the Pandora and moved on to other projects. The excessive delays in getting the Pandora out early was frustrating, and now we have a project that is literally moving at a snails pace. Coming up are ipad alternatives based on android (that can only get better and better), not to mention devices such as exopc which is based on win 7 but which will have a lovely UI allowing excellent touch screen functionality.

I wasn't much a fan of the ipad idea when it was first presented, but it has really grown on me. The ipad itself is imo overpriced and crippled by Apple, but I can easily see myself using a similar device based on android with USB ports, card slots etc for reading pdf's in portrait mode. Not to mention the lovely experience you gain from browsing the web on such devices.

Meh, my 500th post will be off-topic :/. Well, with only ~600 pandoras out, I was expecting less activity from people who just got their pandoras than what I've seen, but OTOH I was expecting more activity from the core OS team, but it seems they've been exhausted from the stress of putting out the released OS, so thats understandable. Relating to wifi I personally never wanted wifi because I dont have any wifi HW to use it with, but the bluetooth was the killer app for me. And it seems comically that bluetooth ethernet overperforms WiFi at the moment atleast in some devices (stable 180KiB/s (1.4Mbit/s) for me with bluetooth (which would be the rated real throughput of 2Mbit/s mode, so I'm guessing with a different EDR adapter on my router it could reach its real rated 2.1Mbit/s), versus people have reported <100KiB/s data rates), so end of story for me, I'm not interested. I know the pandora has it's faults in both SW and HW (atleast on some the first units), they have never disminished my love for it, so atleast from a hacker/developer perspective it's already quite perfect within limits of current hardware.

EDIT: -that (doubled up...)

 

[God Ginrai]

now resume the Flash talking, please, i'm lovin it

+1. The only iPad conversation going on in here should be talking about Frash.

-God Ginrai

 

[Hitnrun]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

 

[God Ginrai]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

I will certainly miss flash content, because Newgrounds has some of the best flash videos and games out there. There's a big scene.

-God Ginrai

 

[craigix]

Unfortunately it feels like a lot of devs have already given up on the Pandora and moved on to other projects.

No.

Seriously, how fast did you expect development to move?

 

[chris_c]

I will certainly miss flash content, because Newgrounds has some of the best flash videos and games out there. There's a big scene.

One minority website few have heard of? flash games? most flash games I have seen seem to suffer, if you want hardware accelerated 3d in flash what do you do? even java can managed HW accelerated 3d in a browser...

Flash is a bag of bolts... It probably will survive for a while yet, does it deserve to? NO, does the pandora *really* need it? NO

OTOH kudos to whoever first gets it working on the dora....

 

[fraseyboy]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

 

[lulzfish]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

HTML5 doesn't specify a codec.
Do we have H.264 decoders in any of the Pandora's browsers yet?

 

[Alpha2]

I will certainly miss flash content, because Newgrounds has some of the best flash videos and games out there. There's a big scene.

One minority website few have heard of? flash games? most flash games I have seen seem to suffer, if you want hardware accelerated 3d in flash what do you do? even java can managed HW accelerated 3d in a browser...

Flash is a bag of bolts... It probably will survive for a while yet, does it deserve to? NO, does the pandora *really* need it? NO

OTOH kudos to whoever first gets it working on the dora....

NG is hardly a site "few have heard of", it's a major flash based free entertainment hub. But even disregarding NG there are millions of random places across the internet that become inaccessible without flash. Ultimately getting it working could make the difference between the Pandora being just another device and being a real threat to the netbook market.

 

[God Ginrai]

I will certainly miss flash content, because Newgrounds has some of the best flash videos and games out there. There's a big scene.

One minority website few have heard of? flash games? most flash games I have seen seem to suffer, if you want hardware accelerated 3d in flash what do you do? even java can managed HW accelerated 3d in a browser...

Flash is a bag of bolts... It probably will survive for a while yet, does it deserve to? NO, does the pandora *really* need it? NO

OTOH kudos to whoever first gets it working on the dora....

NG is hardly a site "few have heard of", it's a major flash based free entertainment hub. But even disregarding NG there are millions of random places across the internet that become inaccessible without flash. Ultimately getting it working could make the difference between the Pandora being just another device and being a real threat to the netbook market.

+1. I would even go so far as to say that if it were not for Newgrounds, (and maybe flash portal) Flash would not be nearly as popular as it has become.

-God Ginrai

 

[Hitnrun]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

AFAIK, this is only in testing, and it does not works in Firefox, which doesn't have the h.264 codec that YouTube uses.
But I am sure that this will be solved in little time.

 

[God Ginrai]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

AFAIK, this is only in testing, and it does not works in Firefox, which doesn't have the h.264 codec that YouTube uses.
But I am sure that this will be solved in little time.

Youtube has started to use webm now. But that only works in a special build of Firefox.

-God Ginrai

 

[fraseyboy]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

AFAIK, this is only in testing, and it does not works in Firefox, which doesn't have the h.264 codec that YouTube uses.
But I am sure that this will be solved in little time.

The HTML Beta works fine for me in Google Chrome on Ubuntu and Windows. Someone ported Chrome to the Pandora, right?

 

[God Ginrai]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

AFAIK, this is only in testing, and it does not works in Firefox, which doesn't have the h.264 codec that YouTube uses.
But I am sure that this will be solved in little time.

The HTML Beta works fine for me in Google Chrome on Ubuntu and Windows. Someone ported Chrome to the Pandora, right?

No, Chromium, and that writes to the NAND. Also, not everyone likes Chromium. (IMHO, It's always lacking key features)

-God Ginrai

 

[fraseyboy]

I think than when YouTube works for everyone without flash player, no one will miss that much flash content (except FarmVille addicts).

Scuse the noobish question but...

YouTube has an HTML5 mode. Shouldn't that work on the Pandora?

AFAIK, this is only in testing, and it does not works in Firefox, which doesn't have the h.264 codec that YouTube uses.
But I am sure that this will be solved in little time.

The HTML Beta works fine for me in Google Chrome on Ubuntu and Windows. Someone ported Chrome to the Pandora, right?

No, Chromium, and that writes to the NAND. Also, not everyone likes Chromium. (IMHO, It's always lacking key features)

-God Ginrai

Not everyone likes Firefox either. But if YouTube worked in Chromium I'm sure people would learn to like it a hell of a lot more...

 

[atomicthumbs]

the only problem I have with chromium is SSL

 

[Hitnrun]

No, Chromium, and that writes to the NAND.

I was thinking of asking this too, it is writing its cache to the $HOME path, writing to NAND? This is bad.

 

[PokeParadox]

Yeah... Chromium needs updating... it's near useless without ssl. And writing to nand should be fixed.

 

[hdonk]

Getting back on topic:

If anyone else who's had experience doing this kind of black box porting before wants to muck in, I can pm them a link to a tarball of what I've done so far - I've tidied it up a bit & put a getting started script together. It's 516MB though so I don't want to put it out on general access ATM.

I've not yet managed to get any meaningful debugging out of the blasted plugin.

The plugin is recognised by Firefox, and doesn't cause any kind of crash when looking at a flash containing page, so I'm assuming the ABI is ok as is.

I'm currently missing a static initialiser for my shadow __sF, which is unfortunately hidden in the Pandora's C library.

I believe that the plugin is managing to read the swf file, as the pages with flash in them seem to have a correctly sized misbehaving frame - info which I believe comes from the swf.

With the new Firefox plugin wrapper, it's reporting that the child threads terminated, which makes me think that there's something the flash plugin is going to that it's getting an unexpected return result and is therefore dropping out. Which is why I suspect it's an API issue somewhere. I think it's going to be time to hexedi- rename the function calls in the libflashplayer.so file to something random, and put a shim between them and their external equivalents to trace what exactly it thinks it is doing.

Just don't ask me when I'm going to get a round 2it.