Why not use swfdec-mozilla? (was Re: Installing Flash on the OLPC)

2009-01-01 Thread Nirbheek Chauhan
Hello everyone,
(top-posting due to tangent nature of discussion)

Just a thought here, in my experience, swfdec[1] works far better than
gnash for flash websites; why not use that? There's a Firefox/Gecko
plugin called swfdec-mozilla which works beautifully.

swfdec{,-mozilla} use gstreamer, are LGPLed, and support most of the
Flash 9 features whereas gnash supports only a few of the Flash 9
features. swfdec is also the default Flash player on Fedora, and is
the preferred flash player on Ubuntu.

Were there some specific problems with using swfdec? Or was it not
under consideration due to some factors?

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 5:11 AM, S Page  wrote:
> Dear genesee, Carlos Nazareno, Everybody,
>
>  Many more people are going to read
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Adobe_Flash page than follow this mailing
> list.  Your effect on XO users by only answering problems here is
> limited, you're just making the smart smarter still.



-- 
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Re: XOs with no sound

2009-01-01 Thread Philipp Kocher
Happy New Year.

We don't use the Measure Activity.
Here are the most frequently used Activities using sound:
- Scratch version 11 (with resume sound problem, ticket #6201)
- Record version 59
- Browse version 98 with Adobe flash plugin version 10.0.12.36 (gnash
deinstalled) for a flash based English learning program
- Gcompris bundle Version 10
- Speak version 9

Recording with Scratch works with "No sound XOs" even so Capture volume 
is set to 0.

I will keep an eye on the alsamixer when I use these activities.

Regards,
Philipp

James Cameron wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 03:52:05PM +0700, Philipp Kocher wrote:
>> Alsa keeps the values in memory and writes it into the  
>> /etc/alsa/asound.state file during shutdown. The file has a new  
>> timestamp, so someone is writing into it at least.
> 
> Okay, that must be a build 767 thing.  Recent development builds use
> /etc/asound.state only.  I've checked only the development builds at
> this stage.
> 
>> Master Mono Playback Switch: is "false" should be "true" (line 50)
>> Master Mono Playback Volume: is "0" should be "28" (line 61)
> 
> These two should have no effect.  I've tested that they have no effect
> on audio playback.  The method I used was to temporarily install the OSS
> module, and run a background process writing noise to the output.  Thus:
> 
>   modprobe snd-pcm-oss
>   dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/dsp &
> 
> While this is running I then manipulated the controls using alsamixer.
> The Master Mono Playback controls did nothing.
> 
> (Incidentally, the volume control keys on the keyboard changed the
> Master control only, not the Master Mono control, and not the PCM
> control.)
> 
>> PCM Playback Switch: is "false:false" should be "true:true" (line 178)
> 
> In "false:false" state, this switch prevents all sound output from
> activities and applications.  The noise test above fell silent.
> 
>> PCM Playback Volume: is "0:0" should be "22:22" (line 190)
> 
> In "0:0" state, the audio is less loud, but not eliminated.  The noise
> test continued to generate audio, but I needed to set the Master control
> (not the Master Mono control) to at least 50%.
> 
>> Capture Volume: is "0:0" should be "15:15" (line 287)
> 
> In this state, the noise test audio is unchanged.  This would affect
> sound capture using microphone though.
> 
>> I hope that helps.
> 
> Yes, it does.  It shows the immediate cause of the problem was that the
> PCM Playback Switch was turned off.  That the Capture control was also
> changed is interesting.
> 
> I've searched the installed activities on a development build here for
> references to the amixer command.  The only activity that I've found it
> used in is Measure.
> 
> Measure.activity/toolbar_side.py ... changes the Capture control.
> 
> Measure.activity/audiograb.py ... changes the PCM Playback Switch.
> 
> Is Measure being used?  Can you reproduce the symptom on a working XO by
> asking for a shutdown while Measure is running?  What version of Measure
> is being used?
> 
> Version 20 of Measure attempts to restore PCM to 70 on quit.  Does the
> symptom clear if Measure is started and then quit?
> 

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Re: Why not use swfdec-mozilla? (was Re: Installing Flash on the OLPC)

2009-01-01 Thread Brian Pepple
On Thu, 2009-01-01 at 14:16 +0530, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> swfdec{,-mozilla} use gstreamer, are LGPLed, and support most of the
> Flash 9 features whereas gnash supports only a few of the Flash 9
> features. swfdec is also the default Flash player on Fedora, and is
> the preferred flash player on Ubuntu.

Quick clarification.  We discussed making swfdec installed by default
during the development of Fedora 9, but decided against doing so since
we felt it wasn't quite ready for that.

> Were there some specific problems with using swfdec? Or was it not
> under consideration due to some factors?

I'm not sure if it was considered, but as the maintainer of swfdec in
Fedora I can state that swfdec is very cpu-intensive, and I have my
doubts whether the performance on the XO would be comparable to gnash's,
though it might be worth investigating.

Later,
/B
-- 
Brian Pepple 

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Bpepple
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BD5E 6F9E 8688 E668 8F5B  CBDE 326A E936 810C C15E


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Re: Why not use swfdec-mozilla?

2009-01-01 Thread Carlos Nazareno
Hi Nirbheek!

> swfdec{,-mozilla} use gstreamer, are LGPLed, and support most of the

I've never really tried Swfdec before, but if it also uses Gstreamer
for decoding SWF sound (almost always encoded in MP3), we'd still end
up with the same problem as that currently experienced in getting
sound to work with Gnash on the XO.

The main problem I've had so far is getting the Gstreamer Ugly plugins
set (non-FOSS plugins, including the MP3 decoder) installed properly
on XO 8.2.0 via Yum because the Gstreamer in 8.2.0's repository is
some kind of mishmash from the older Fedora 8 version, not the one
from Fedora 9 which XO OS 8.2.0 is based on.

Because of this, installing Gstreamer plugins ugly via yum causes a
lot of complaints and it doesn't really get installed and updated
properly. (I do believe the build team didn't upgrade gstreamer
repository in 8.2.0 to the latest packages because the latest version
had problems with the XO's camera)

And since I'm rather new to Linux, recompiling Gnash with MP3 sound
running is currently beyond my ken.

It would be really cool if we could update the Gnash page with a
dummy's guide to enabling sound for Gnash if the team is strongly
committed to libre (FOSS) vs gratis (Free, but proprietary --
something I personally have no problem with as my distro of choice is
Linux Mint ;P).

Anyway, the current frustrating dillema is that it's so much easier to
just install the Adobe Flash plugin than to get sound working with
Gnash on the XO, and this is really wrong on so many levels if OLPC is
trying promote the use of Gnash as the XO OS's default flash media
player.

Btw, any chance of slipping in Gnash 0.8.4 for the next build?

Cheers!

-Naz

-- 
Carlos Nazareno
http://www.object404.com
--
interactive media specialist
zen graffiti studios
http://www.zengraffiti.com
--
Philippine Flash ActionScripters
http://www.phlashers.com
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Problems with Adobe Flash player on the XO.

2009-01-01 Thread Stanley Sokolow
Hi,

I'm having problems:  Adobe FlashPlayer doesn't detect the XO's built-in 
webcam so it can't transmit video out to the Internet on Flash-enabled 
web sites, and the Adobe Flash player on the XO freezes the popup 
right-click control panel.   Gnash didn't work at all with a Flash-based 
web site we're interested in, so I went to the real FlashPlayer, latest 
version.

I've been lurking here watching the comments on Gnash versus Flash while 
I tried to get my wife's XO playing nicely with a Flash-based RIA (rich 
internet application) site called www.vyew.com .(That's pronounced 
like "view".) Vyew is a collaborative whiteboard application with 
video, voice, and text chatting features in addition to the 
whiteboard.   By whiteboard, I mean that several users can connect to 
the same page and collaborate on drawing sketches and typing text on the 
same screen, which is visible to all of the connected people.They 
can also activate their camera and microphone (if they exist) to carry 
on two-way conversations like Skype.   She wants to use this for a 
remote tutoring activity where she interacts with students about math 
problems.We tried to get Paint and Colors activities to play nicely 
with various Sugar emulators (LiveCD, Sugar on Ubuntu, Sugar on Windows 
Vista) but they all had various problems seeing (presence detection) or 
collaborating.  So we found this web site, Vyew.   The Vyew site didn't 
load the Flash content on the web page with Browse and Gnash, so I 
installed the real Adobe Flash player on the XO.  We have been largely 
successful with Vyew and Adobe FlashPlayer on the XO.  Both computers 
can see each other's drawings collaboratively on the same page, but we 
ran into one problem that relates to Flash on the XO.  

The XO browser can see the webcam video stream from our Dell laptop 
running Vyew on the Dell's Vista browsers (MS IE & Firefox) and can hear 
the audio stream from the Dell, but I can't get Flash to activate the 
XO's camera.When I right-click on the Flash box in the web page, the 
Flash popup menu appears.   I click the "settings" item.  Adobe Flash 
Player control panel pops up as it should, but it is just frozen.   I 
can't get it to flip to the other tabs to set the camera & microphone 
permissions.   In fact, the panel won't even quit when I click the Close 
button.   Nothing gets rid of it except reloading or leaving the web 
page.   This was while running on the XO's Browse activity.   I thought 
that maybe Opera for the XO would do better.  No luck.   Opera as 
installed from the wiki.laptop.org/opera instructions does not even play 
the Flash on the Adobe web site: www.adobe.com/products/flash/about , 
nor any other Flash embedded in a web page.   All that Opera shows is a 
gray rectangle where the Flash should be, no text saying to click to 
play the Flash.   This is apparently a problem of Opera not interacting 
well with FlashPlayer, because the Opera plugin directories point to the 
very same plugin program file by symbolic linkage, so it's not a bad 
plugin file -- the Adobe plugin plays the Flash .swf embedded element 
with Browse, just not perfectly, but Opera doesn't play it at all.

I submitted a comment to the Opera programmer who maintains the Opera 
blog about the OLPC version, but that blog has had very little activity 
in the past year so I'm not hopeful of any results from the Opera 
people.Has anyone here tried to run a recent release of Opera on the 
XO, not the very old version that was customized for the XO according to 
our wiki?

For the record, here are the various versions I'm running:  XO has build 
767 of Sugar, the XO is one recently received from the G1G1 program 
through Amazon, the FlashPlayer is the one recommended on the 
wiki.laptop.org page: 
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-10.0.15.3-release.i386.rpm
 
, the "about" Flash page reports the correct release 10,0,15,3 and so 
does the README in the flash-plugin folder on the XO, and uname reports 
that my XO's Linux version is 2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc.f10b654367d7065.

Even without the 2-way video streaming, www.vyew.com is a nice 
application for collaboration over the Internet.  Try it.

Stan Sokolow


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[Fwd: Problems with Adobe Flash player on the XO.]

2009-01-01 Thread Stanley Sokolow




Regarding my prior message, I just found this bug report at Adobe
regarding camera not working with FlashPlayer on Linux, but it says
that FlashPlayer 10 should resolve the problem.    Apparently it didn't
on the XO.   

https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-137

Stan

 Original Message 

  

  Subject: 
  Problems with Adobe Flash player on the XO.


  Date: 
  Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:20:38 -0800


  From: 
  Stanley Sokolow 


  To: 
  Nirbheek Chauhan 


  CC: 
  devel@lists.laptop.org


  References: 
  <8b4c83ad0901010046rc055feaw7b82db5c1de2e...@mail.gmail.com>

  



Hi,

I'm having problems:  Adobe FlashPlayer doesn't detect the XO's built-in 
webcam so it can't transmit video out to the Internet on Flash-enabled 
web sites, and the Adobe Flash player on the XO freezes the popup 
right-click control panel.   Gnash didn't work at all with a Flash-based 
web site we're interested in, so I went to the real FlashPlayer, latest 
version.

I've been lurking here watching the comments on Gnash versus Flash while 
I tried to get my wife's XO playing nicely with a Flash-based RIA (rich 
internet application) site called www.vyew.com .(That's pronounced 
like "view".) Vyew is a collaborative whiteboard application with 
video, voice, and text chatting features in addition to the 
whiteboard.   By whiteboard, I mean that several users can connect to 
the same page and collaborate on drawing sketches and typing text on the 
same screen, which is visible to all of the connected people.They 
can also activate their camera and microphone (if they exist) to carry 
on two-way conversations like Skype.   She wants to use this for a 
remote tutoring activity where she interacts with students about math 
problems.We tried to get Paint and Colors activities to play nicely 
with various Sugar emulators (LiveCD, Sugar on Ubuntu, Sugar on Windows 
Vista) but they all had various problems seeing (presence detection) or 
collaborating.  So we found this web site, Vyew.   The Vyew site didn't 
load the Flash content on the web page with Browse and Gnash, so I 
installed the real Adobe Flash player on the XO.  We have been largely 
successful with Vyew and Adobe FlashPlayer on the XO.  Both computers 
can see each other's drawings collaboratively on the same page, but we 
ran into one problem that relates to Flash on the XO.  

The XO browser can see the webcam video stream from our Dell laptop 
running Vyew on the Dell's Vista browsers (MS IE & Firefox) and can hear 
the audio stream from the Dell, but I can't get Flash to activate the 
XO's camera.When I right-click on the Flash box in the web page, the 
Flash popup menu appears.   I click the "settings" item.  Adobe Flash 
Player control panel pops up as it should, but it is just frozen.   I 
can't get it to flip to the other tabs to set the camera & microphone 
permissions.   In fact, the panel won't even quit when I click the Close 
button.   Nothing gets rid of it except reloading or leaving the web 
page.   This was while running on the XO's Browse activity.   I thought 
that maybe Opera for the XO would do better.  No luck.   Opera as 
installed from the wiki.laptop.org/opera instructions does not even play 
the Flash on the Adobe web site: www.adobe.com/products/flash/about , 
nor any other Flash embedded in a web page.   All that Opera shows is a 
gray rectangle where the Flash should be, no text saying to click to 
play the Flash.   This is apparently a problem of Opera not interacting 
well with FlashPlayer, because the Opera plugin directories point to the 
very same plugin program file by symbolic linkage, so it's not a bad 
plugin file -- the Adobe plugin plays the Flash .swf embedded element 
with Browse, just not perfectly, but Opera doesn't play it at all.

I submitted a comment to the Opera programmer who maintains the Opera 
blog about the OLPC version, but that blog has had very little activity 
in the past year so I'm not hopeful of any results from the Opera 
people.Has anyone here tried to run a recent release of Opera on the 
XO, not the very old version that was customized for the XO according to 
our wiki?

For the record, here are the various versions I'm running:  XO has build 
767 of Sugar, the XO is one recently received from the G1G1 program 
through Amazon, the FlashPlayer is the one recommended on the 
wiki.laptop.org page: 
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-10.0.15.3-release.i386.rpm 
, the "about" Flash page reports the correct release 10,0,15,3 and so 
does the README in the flash-plugin folder on the XO, and uname reports 
that my XO's Linux version is 2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc.f10b654367d7065.

Even without the 2-way video streaming, www.vyew.com is a nice 
application for collaboration over the Internet.  Try it.

Stan Sokolow






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UDP broadcast from an XO

2009-01-01 Thread shivaprasad javali
Hi,

I have an activity which broadcasts messages over UDP to all the systems
connected to the network. I ran into a problem while testing it out on the
XO. The messages broadcasted are received by other XO's if both of them are
connected to a common WiFi router. But when they are connected to the router
teh messages are not received by my activity on the other XO.

   Although the other XO is visible to my XO( in the neighbourhood view) the
UDP messages broadcast from my XO are not received by the other XO when they
are nto connected through a common router.

Will UDP messages be broadcast from one XO node to another. What else
may the cause be for the UDP messages not being picked up by the other XO?

Thanks
jbsp72
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Re: UDP broadcast from an XO

2009-01-01 Thread quozl
Visibility in Neighbourhood View is determined by access from the XO to
the Jabber server.  The Jabber server does not relay these UDP packets
for you.  Therefore visibility is not an indicator of ability to operate
over UDP.

A wireless router will relay the UDP packets.  The relay is being done
by the router itself, and so any XO not associated with the router may
not receive the UDP packets unless the packets are forwarded by the
router to whatever router the other XO is associated with.

Can you show me one of these UDP packets?

-- 
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Re: UDP broadcast from an XO

2009-01-01 Thread david
On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, qu...@laptop.org wrote:

> Visibility in Neighbourhood View is determined by access from the XO to
> the Jabber server.  The Jabber server does not relay these UDP packets
> for you.  Therefore visibility is not an indicator of ability to operate
> over UDP.
>
> A wireless router will relay the UDP packets.  The relay is being done
> by the router itself, and so any XO not associated with the router may
> not receive the UDP packets unless the packets are forwarded by the
> router to whatever router the other XO is associated with.
>
> Can you show me one of these UDP packets?

remember that broadcast packets don't generally go through routers (they 
go through bridges, but not routers)

so if the two XO's are on different subnets, broadcasts won't be seen by 
the other one.

David Lang
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Re: Why not use swfdec-mozilla? (was Re: Installing Flash on the OLPC)

2009-01-01 Thread Peter Robinson
>> swfdec{,-mozilla} use gstreamer, are LGPLed, and support most of the
>> Flash 9 features whereas gnash supports only a few of the Flash 9
>> features. swfdec is also the default Flash player on Fedora, and is
>> the preferred flash player on Ubuntu.
>
> Quick clarification.  We discussed making swfdec installed by default
> during the development of Fedora 9, but decided against doing so since
> we felt it wasn't quite ready for that.
>
>> Were there some specific problems with using swfdec? Or was it not
>> under consideration due to some factors?
>
> I'm not sure if it was considered, but as the maintainer of swfdec in
> Fedora I can state that swfdec is very cpu-intensive, and I have my
> doubts whether the performance on the XO would be comparable to gnash's,
> though it might be worth investigating.

I've found it very cpu intensive on Fedora 9 and 10 with a penryn dual
core processor. It basically pins one of the cores to 100% CPU but if
I download the video by saving it from the properties box within the
plugin I don't see that issue using the swfdec-gnome player so there's
probably some low hanging fruit within the actual plugin that might be
able to improve the problem easily for someone that knows where to
look.

Peter
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