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Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

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Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#21

Post by nchelluri »

cpeterso wrote: post #7

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/s…

Am I correct in thinking the face on the site is supposed to be like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2#mediaviewer/File:Acid2_r... , but maybe updated with some of Flash's capabilities?

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#22

Post by zobzu »

cpeterso wrote: post #7

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/s…

Do you fear that by the time shumway actually works for "most ppl stuff" flash would already be gone and the effort wasted? (its gone from YT..)

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#23

Post by cpeterso »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #13

Sounds like Shumway is already further along than Gnash or Lightspark. What versions of SWF does Shumway aim to support? 7, 8, 9, 10, all of the above? How does Shumway interact with click-to-play and similar mechanisms to stop unwanted Flash objects from playing? Does it have that functionality built-in?

Shumway is implementing APIs as needed, not targeting a specific SWF version.

Shumway does not currently support click-to-play because it is not a real browser plugin. It hooks into Firefox's click-to-play mechanism to conditionally override the Flash plugin. This is a hack and will soon be replaced with "jsplugins", a Firefox feature that will allow browser plugins to be written in JS and run in an out-of-process sandbox:

https://bugzil.la/jsplugins

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#24

Post by stuaxo »

cpeterso wrote: post #7

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/s…

Have you thought of working with some of the other open source flash implementations on compatibility tests ?

I'm guessing that lightspark must already have some tests, and from your side there are probably some they could use too ?

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#26

Post by cpeterso »

zobzu wrote: post #22
cpeterso wrote: post #7

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/s…

Do you fear that by the time shumway actually works for "most ppl stuff" flash would already be gone and the effort wasted? (its gone from YT..)

Yes and no. Shumway is in a race to stay relevant as Flash fades from the web, but there will always be a long-tail of Flash content that would/will be lost when Adobe or browsers stop supporting the Flash plugin.

Even YouTube must continue to support Flash video for at least another year because many websites embedded Flash videos using YouTube's boilerplate embedding HTML with the Flash tag. Google can't magically rewrite these third-party websites' HTML. :) Maybe YouTube can use some SWF that loads or redirects people to youtube.com? Or browsers could recognize YouTube's boilerplate embedding HTML and rewrite it with YouTube's HTML5 video.

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#27

Post by cpeterso »

duskwuff wrote: post #15
cpeterso wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JWPlayer support is difficult because there are many JWPlayer variants and old versions out there. It's easier to test and whitelist individual websites to start.

Why bother emulating it, though? If you can recognize it, and recognize that it's not using any unusual settings, you could potentially just replace the whole thing with a native video player.

That's a good question. Video is just one use case for Shumway. This specific use case might be better supported by rewriting Flash tags with an HTML5 video player, but Mozilla dislikes adding hacks to workaround site-specific quirks. The hacks are technical debt carried by Firefox on behalf of websites that don't bother to maintain themselves. Mozilla even removes moz- prefixed DOM APIs and CSS attributes when the standardized, unprefixed name is supported.

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#28

Post by synchronise »

cpeterso wrote: post #7

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/s…

Have you implemented support for Real Time Media Flow Protocol?

If so, is it possible to use UDP over shumway?

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#29

Post by cpeterso »

CyberShadow wrote: post #18
snissn wrote: post #14

How do you go from swf files to "action script"? Do you use flasm/flare for as2? How do you turn as3 abc files into action script? Did you write your own decompiler or use some other open source ones? There's a disassembler written in D for as3 that I used to use called rabcdasm, did your team ever take a look at that?

> There's a disassembler written in D for as3 that I used to use called rabcdasm, did your team ever take a look at that? RABCDAsm author here. Curious about the same, I've always thought the project might be useful to VM implementers. Also wondering if you've had trouble with obfuscators that employ control flow obfuscation, and create unreachable basic blocks with junk code.

Yes, definitely! SWF obfuscators are a problem because they rely on undocumented behavior and implementation details of the Flash plugin that the Shumway developers must debug and support to maintain compatibility. Obfuscated AS1 code can do strange things like jumping to unaligned SWF addresses in the middle of bytecodes.

Re: Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

#30

Post by cpeterso »

nchelluri wrote: post #21
cpeterso wrote: post #7

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/s…

Am I correct in thinking the face on the site is supposed to be like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2#mediaviewer/File:Acid2_r... , but maybe updated with some of Flash's capabilities?

Yes. It's a variant of Acid2 face. I don't know where that SWF is from originally.
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