Having studied librtmp over the weekend, it doesn't drop into gnash as neatly as I'd hoped. Gnash already has classes to implement NetConnection and NetStream, which it makes sense to use - but librtmp is designed to replace the need for such classes to exist. So it implements certain higher-level responses to various calls from the server, that are necessary when downloading a stream. Gnash probably needs to hook in instead, and let the flash application decide what to do in these cases. ...

Of course, now everyone wants to hate Flattr, and ban its buttons from Planet Debian. You can't coerce effectively over a network connection - unless you wave the DMUP at them. It's an interesting exercise to square this approach with the promise at the heart of free software - freedom. We let people sell our software for a profit; we're a billion-dollar industry now. (Red Hat alone is worth $1bn.) That's before we start counting the money made by the businesses whose servers rely on us. But a developer advertising for €25 per month in donations? They must be banned! ...

So I studied the SWF 8 iPlayer a little - there are some simple rendering issues with Gnash that I'd like to come back to, but the biggest problem is obviously the media not playing. Looking at the network requests, wireshark says something about malformed packets - Gnash is getting as far as making RTMP requests, but the connection dies pretty quickly. My working theory is that there is a bug in the Gnash RTMP client code. This code was forked from rtmpdump, and has since been converted from C to C++, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's quite possible that there is some change deep in the code which hasn't been copied back into Gnash - therefore, it makes sense to get Gnash building against librtmp properly, which is now a separate library. ...

There exist several different versions of BBC iPlayer. (Even if you don't care about the main iPlayer site, perhaps you might want to watch videos on BBC News one day, which uses the same code.) Here is some (reformatted) Javascript from the BBC's site: a = glow.embed.Flash.version(); f = ""; f = a.major>=10 ? "10player.swf" : a.major<8 ? "7player.swf" : a.major==9 && (a.minor>0 || a.release>=115) ? "9player.swf" : "player.swf"; It is clear that Flash 9.0.115 holds special significance; this was the version that introduced SWF Verification support. The 7player.swf file seems to have disappeared entirely - I get a "404 not found" error. That means there is still one version of the iPlayer which hopefully should not require implementing SWF Verification. ...

So, with the GNASH_OPTIONS=writelauncher hint from last time, you have got a script which runs gnash. It is still running a remote SWF file, though - you want to modify that file to isolate a test case, and for that it will need to be on the local filesystem. First, look in the gnash-debug-1.sh script to find the URL for the SWF, and download it. It's the last option passed to gnash. ...

Gnash has moved from bzr to git, at least for the moment - Savannah's bzr setup is slow and unlikely to improve, so the choice is git or Launchpad, apparently. (Thinking selfishly, I'm a lot more familiar with git than with bzr, so I hope it stays this way.) My instructions from July have changed only slightly: git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/git/gnash cd gnash ./autogen.sh ./configure --enable-renderer=agg \ --enable-media=GST \ --enable-gui=gtk \ --with-plugins-install=system make sudo make install sudo make install-plugins ...

Dato pointed out on my post yesterday that I had omitted to link to the Ikea catalogue. And then it hit me - I am completely failing to monetize this blog! (Sadly, Ikea aren't in a position to give me any kickbacks right now.) Since my money would be spent on innovative Swedish design in any case, I present a new microdonations system: Flattr-pack. I'll add a "Flattr-pack this!" button to everything I write, and then you can send me furniture with one easy click. ...

Today I bought two Ikea boxes. Possibly the best £8 I have ever spent - I still have a load of bits of paper to sort out, but now they're all hidden from sight in a sleek, black and chrome rivet-effect container. More than simply reclaiming my sofa from the piles of notes, they seem to point to a higher truth; they fit their purpose in a way that is hard to articulate, like some platonic Form. Taking complexity, and making it manageable; but more than that, elegant. ...

I've been ill this week. The only hacking I've been doing is of the cough variety. :) I think I'm recovering, though. This evening, I finally checked out LibreOffice, to get an idea what's going on - kicked off a build, joined the mailing lists. Some of the easy hacks look quite feasible, but there's always a bit of work to get started. The community looks very welcoming, though, so no problems there. ...

My humble RC bug squashing efforts for this week. I've saved them all up, because I don't want to spam Planet Debian too much... or alternatively, because I've been feeling ill Thursday/Friday and didn't do anything at all. #598619 in x11vnc NMU'd, after one false start, but at least I learnt something. #586849 and #586838 in mgltools-{utpackages,geomutils} confirmed fixed. Patch written for #592417 in mgltools-utpackages. Verified and NMU'd patch for #410130 in cryptonit. #590383 in rabbitmq-server confirmed fixed. Investigated why #589194 in openclipart hadn't been closed, although it was Anibal who eventually sponsored the patch. #599988 in lwjgl fixed and uploaded. Confirmed #599959 in sawfish closed from last week, after it got binNMUs. Patch finally written for #593856 in gnucash. ...