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The Trouble with Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is used to deliver the bulk of the video, advertisement, and browser-based game content on the internet. Unfortunately, both the SWF format itself and the decoder that Adobe releases is entirely proprietary; in short, Adobe's market share is more important to them than their potential to make the internet a better place for openness and cooperation. Fortunately, for those of us that consciously value our freedoms, other alternatives exist.
There are two free software Flash players:
- Swfdec, which has good compatibility but abruptly ceased to be developed sometime in early 2009.
- Gnash, the GNU SWF player, which is being rapidly developed and relies on the gstreamer and ffmpeg backends to perform. It has good compatibility up to SWF 8 and 9.
YouTube
The video-sharing phenomenon that is YouTube started in 2005 and took the world wide web by storm almost overnight. To the dismay of Free Software users everywhere, use of SWF became unavoidable. The following year, Google Inc. bought the service and has owned it ever since. In 2010, Google started an opt-in experiment to view videos with the new HTML5 specification as an alternative to Flash. Unfortunately, the format they have chosen is the closed, patent-encumbered H.264, not an open, royalty-free format like Theora. Contrary to Google's rhetoric, this decision has nothing to do with the technical capabilities of the Theora format, and everything to do with Google's promoting their own proprietary Chrome browser.
The latest versions of both Gnash and Swfdec should be able to play YouTube videos with good performance. However, users have reported that some YouTube videos refuse to play at all while others work just fine. There is a fallback solution available if you experience such an issue:
- Download the free software Greasemonkey add-on for the browser.
- Get the "YouTube Perfect" script for Greasemonkey, and also the embedded version.
- An alternate Greasemonkey script you can use, if the above does not work for you, is YouTube without Flash Auto.
- Now you can view any YouTube video as an MP4 video.
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is another popular video sharing website. They launched around the same time as YouTube although never quite reached the same level of success.
In 2009 Dailymotion did something wonderful for Free Software by opening an alternative HTML5 portal to the website and converting many of their videos to Theora format.
Although Dailymotion is to be commended for this decision, there are still several problems that we should ignore:
- Hundreds of thousands of videos are available in Theora format right now, especially the very popular ones, but many more videos have not been re-encoded and are Flash-only.
- You have to be a MotionMaker (a certified uploader of original content) to even have the option of uploading videos as HTML5.
- Dailymotion does not advertise this portal very well. Someone could potentially use Dailymotion for a long time and never know the Theora portal exists.
How You Can Help
- Use free alternatives to Flash whenever and wherever you can.
- Let your friends know that most of the videos and games on the web rely on a single company's closed standard to work, and why this is bad for an open and cooperative vision of the internet.
- If you develop online games, don't use Flash. Use a free platform such as OpenJDK Java to deliver content inside the browser, and please share your source code.
- Adobe has a poor track record with freedom, and it isn't going to change its policies overnight. If our community can eventually convince Adobe to make some concessions, such as publicly documenting the SWF standard, or releasing the source code at least for the GNU/Linux version of its Flash player, it would improve the situation greatly.
