58th Annual Emmy Awards Technology & Engineering

On January 8th I had the privilege to attend the 58th Annual Emmy Awards for Technology & Engineering in Las Vegas and receive, together with other co-workers, an award. In case you did not know, Adobe Inc., among other well known companies in this industry got an award for advancing streaming technology, specifically video streaming over the internet.

The actual team at Adobe working on Flash Video technology has remained small over the years. So it was fairly easy to get the most important people from our engineering teams to be on stage to receive the award, something Microsoft and Apple were apparently not able to do:



(Engineers in suits! I am the second guy from the left, low resolution is on purpose to protect the innocent.)

And here is a close-up of the award:



Why did we get the award? Well, some will understand and some will not. I will dwell into my personal opinion at some point, right now I do not have the energy to defend myself in that regard :-) It is interesting though that all the major players did receive the award, which is more of a sign that it is really about the acknowledgement that video on web has finally become mainstream. This has been the dream of many for decades, but it really started taking off 2 or 3 years ago.

I am also happy for another award winner this year: John Carmack. He received two awards, one for Doom and one for Quake. These two games were definitely ground breaking and help shape the gaming industry to what it is now.

A non-beta Flash Player 9 for Linux release

We just released another version of the Flash Player 9 for Linux, the version number is 9.0.31.0. What is different this time is that we do no call it a beta anymore and that it is available on our main download site (Click on the Linux x86 link). For the impatient ones, the direct download of the tarball is here, and the .rpm file is here:

Alright, so far so good... That does not mean that this is a release which I consider feature complete. We do however consider this version to be vastly better than any previous Flash Player for Linux. Since customers were starting to ask for a final version we decided to feature freeze what we have. So two months ago we moved the Flash Player 9 for Linux code into a separate code branch for stabilization. QE (Quality Engineering) has been hammering on this branch for all this time. Every bug fix had to be approved by management. The build you can download now (9.0.31.0) represents that branch.

The internal unstable branch is currently open for all developers and for the first time we build the Windows, Mac and Linux versions on a daily basis from the same code branch. There are various large work items which still need to be tackled and we are in full swing getting this ready as soon as possible. These changes are disruptive for the stability of the build and will be for a while.

Here is a list of some of the Linux specific items we are working on right now, it is far from complete and each of the items might or might not make it into the next version:

• XEmbed support (specifically GtkPlug). We have tons of bugs which can only be fixed this way.


• WMODE support. This will be tricky since we need to coordinate this feature with Mozilla as the browsers on Linux have no support for this right now. Also note that XEmbed support is a prerequisite for this feature to work at all.


• Support for Opera. Hopefully we will get it into a state where it runs stable for more than 5 minutes. Opera 9.10 solved a lot of issues, but not all.


• Rewrite the braindead/non-standard http stack in the standalone player. Right now this bug can make the standalone player timeout and block for a long time if you need to open any external URL (local files are fine). I'll spare you the details, but this code is really embarassing in my mind.


• Try to fix other functional bugs which require larger infrastructural changes.


• Finish the flashsupport add-on library. Adding camera, microphone support etc. Move the project to sourceforge.net or similar site. BTW, it's my fault that this has not seen too many changes lately since I own this piece. :-)


• Add full screen support.


• 64bit work is ongoing. You can follow some of the daily progress in the Tamarin CVS tree. (Alright, not too much happened end of December. Forgive us, the holidays are always a little slow in a company like Adobe.)

So what changed between Flash Player 9.0.21.78 beta and 9.0.31.0? Here is a partial list of Linux specific bugs we fixed:


192642 Crash during "Browse multi"
191932 After plug-in player installed, firefox cannot launch (crash while launching)
191298 Firefox 1.5 crashes during tests execution (automated section)
191514 Non Functioning rtmps not functioning
192615 Crash hang navigating away from camera/mic
192747 LocalConnection not functioning between standalone players
192653 change standalone name from gflashplayer to flashplayer
192399 Crash - GrowableBuffer and/or Generated Code
191741 crash when "Allow" is clicked in camera settings UI popup when no camera driver is installed on SUSE 9
192006 Clicking on URL failed to launch websites
191749 mouseDown count advancing more than once per click - stand alone
187060 Rotating the image moves image out of the panel
177699 Bug in detection kit in combination with Linux player
191427 rtmpt not functioning
192036 Incorrectly Functioning File->Close is still selectable in the projector
191843 website crashes with a segmentation fault.
191267 Unable to copy/paste text from text fields using context menu.
191857 remove all printfs from release builds of the plugin and standalone


(Update: I started this entry last week to start listing the fixed bugs, but actually posted the news January 16th. Darn. So some you you saw January 11th as the post date... I am really sorry for the confusion...)