After over two months of work since 0.5.0 by a handful of developers, there's finally a new release of Lightspark, the (other) open source Flash player. Unlike Gnash, Lightspark supports the AVM2 virtual machine and the newest versions of SWF files, while falling back to Gnash when it encounters SWF8 or earlier content.

News for users

For users, the most visible change is that YouTube is working again - their player keeps getting updated and sometimes it introduces Flash APIs or VM opcodes which are not fully implemented in Lightspark, resulting in breakage.

Flowplayer had been made to work in this cycle.

EGL/GLES2 based rendering has been added so it can run at reasonable speeds on ARM hardware where there is generally no support for hardware accelerated desktop OpenGL.

Less crashes due to the many small and large fixes added.

Changelog for 0.5.1

* Misc fixes to better support YouTube, Vimeo, Flowplayer
* VM correctness improvements
* Support for AS templates
* Dropped half-finished AVM1 support
* Support for EGL/GLES2 rendering
* Support for loading external JPEGs
* Better text handling(e.g. coloring)
* Improved test runner, support for the Tamarin testsuite
* Various API fixes for bugs uncovered by the testsuite
* Dropped mozilla dependency, use internal NPAPI headers
* Added LIGHTSPARK_PLUGIN_LOGLEVEL environment variable to control the log level of the browser

News for the project

Alessandro, the main author and original maintainer of the project is taking a break for a few months, so most development and project management in this cycle has been done by the existing contributors.

The Lightspark team is planning to release new versions monthly from now on, to get the fixes out sooner.

We also plan to move away from the sourceforge.net homepage and wiki, and manage the project using only two instead of three hosting services :)

* github for code, wiki and developer related issues

* launchpad for user bugtracker, mailing list, release tarballs and Ubuntu PPAs

Download

The release is already available in Debian Sid and Ubuntu Oneiric and there are daily builds available in the team's PPA for Ubuntu Natty and Oneiric. The upstream code is progressing rapidly and does not really add regressions so using these daily packages is pretty safe and also helps a lot with testing.

The release tarball is on Launchpad for other distro packagers or people building from source...

https://launchpad.net/lightspark/0.5.1

...although for the latter category I'd suggest to follow the project on github :)

https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark