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100% Free Flash Play, Serving, And Development
By: Alex Trent
Expert Author
2010-05-19
What was once impossible... now is. Three things are required to accomplish this: Lightspark, Flowplayer, and the Flex SDK.
First, lets cover Lightspark. Lightspark is an open source flash player that supports OpenGL, Actionscript 3.0, and works with Firefox. Lightspark is not totally ready for deployment as it is currently alpha status, but it is making greater strides to support the latest flash technology than any other open source project before it. Grab Lightspark from its Ubuntu PPA here.
Next, there is Flowplayer. Flowplayer is an Open Source video player. Flowplayer supports multiple video formats: MPG, AVI, WMV, and MOV. Flowplayer also supports the global streaming network HDDN. HDDN can reach 90+ countries across the globe. Here is a tutorial on how to setup Flowplayer with lighthttpd.
The last piece of the puzzle is the Flex SDK. Flex was created by Adobe to help developers create flash web applications. The Flex SDK was released as open source in February of 2008. Flex can be used with any IDE like Eclipse for example. There is a tutorial for setting it up on Ubuntu. There is also an alpha version of the Flex Builder for Linux freely available here.
The Flex SDK can be used to create flash applications that are served to web browsers using the Flowplayer and played by the Lightspark flash player.
I can hear you. Someone reading this is screaming, "WHAT ABOUT HTML5!!!????" I agree, what about it? HTML5 does not have the 99.3% market penetration that flash technology has. Even then you might ask, "OK, I see the value of the Flex SDK and Flowplayer, but why Lightspark?" Well, because of the heavy market penetration of flash, it has become a favorite target of virus and malware writers. How can we stop this? By using open source tools like Lightspark, instead of the proprietary version.
So, now you can see that it is possible. Certainly not perfect or ready for heavy deployment, but its getting there.
About the Author:
Alex Trent is a staff writer for WebProNews
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