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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

#31

Post by cpeterso »

synchronise wrote: post #28
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?

Yury Delendik on the Shumway team is working on RTMP.js. It's a standalone JS library, but will eventually be used by Shumway.

https://github.com/yurydelendik/rtmp.js

AFAIK, Shumway does not support UDP sockets, but, as a Firefox extension, it could access Gecko XPCOM APIs that are not available to JS on the web.

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

#32

Post by laumars »

edvinbesic wrote: post #19
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?

Considering this specifically states video and not flash in general I would imagine none of the above. Please correct me if i'm wrong though.

I think you've misunderstood the context of the title. It's in reference to a milestone being reached (ie Shumway now supports playing Amazon.com videos) rather than Shumway's end goal.

From the discussion on HN, it sounds like Shumway aims to be a drop in replacement for Adobe's Flash plugin.

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

#33

Post by CyberShadow »

cpeterso wrote: post #29
CyberShadow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Obfuscated AS1 code can do strange things like jumping to unaligned SWF addresses in the middle of bytecodes.

Oh, I've seen much worse. The AS1 VM actually treats the entire SWF file (after decompression) as an AS program. That means it's possible to jump outside of the bytecode tag and into e.g. the metadata of a JPEG file.

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

#34

Post by realusername »

cpeterso wrote: post #4
rcthompson wrote: post #3

> Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on Windows XP or Linux. Today I learned that Firefox still supports Windows XP.

About 25% of Firefox Windows users run Windows XP.

Yes exactly and from my experience it's really the best browser available on Windows XP.

I've even seen myself a Windows XP with Firefox installed in a shop just a few days ago.

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

#35

Post by proveanegative »

cpeterso wrote: post #26
zobzu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>browsers could recognize YouTube's boilerplate embedding HTML and rewrite it with YouTube's HTML5 video.

Browsers themselves don't need to do it. It could be a (very useful) browser extension or a user script.

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

#36

Post by fafner »

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..)

It's not gone from YT! It's certainly on its way out. But despite the announcement I still see Flash as default in Firefox and even in Chrome it sometimes falls back to Flash (happens to me when I start a video, put my laptop to sleep, and continue the video after resume).

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

#37

Post by espadrine »

realusername wrote: post #34
cpeterso wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 25% of Firefox Windows users run Windows XP.

Yes exactly and from my experience it's really the best browser available on Windows XP. I've even seen myself a Windows XP with Firefox installed in a shop just a few days ago.

Out of curiosity, what are the options on Windows XP? IE 8, Opera 12?

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

#38

Post by rplnt »

cpeterso wrote: post #4
rcthompson wrote: post #3

> Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on Windows XP or Linux. Today I learned that Firefox still supports Windows XP.

About 25% of Firefox Windows users run Windows XP.

Is that a real number? I've seen a huge decrease in Windows XP users over the last year, from almost 20% to bellow 10%. But that was for different product, so I'm wondering if FF got it this bad.

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

#39

Post by threedaymonk »

proveanegative wrote: post #35
cpeterso wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>browsers could recognize YouTube's boilerplate embedding HTML and rewrite it with YouTube's HTML5 video. Browsers themselves don't need to do it. It could be a (very useful) browser extension or a user script.

Here's the user script I use (I've not allowed Flash on my computers since about 2010):

https://github.com/threedaymonk/userscripts/blob/master/yout...

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

#40

Post by Kliment »

cpeterso wrote: post #27
duskwuff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Sounds like a perfect use case for an addon then!
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