Flash Content & Sys Resources

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi Dominic,

I should point out that I'm just a user/admin of Ubuntu/Edubuntu.  Below
are just my observations wrt flash, etc.  I imagine the developers probably
have better ideas.

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Dominic Webb wrote:

> Yes an OS flash plugin would be great. However a lot of the content that
> we are seeing being used just wont work in anything other than the Adobe
> player.

Exactly the problem (though strictly it's macromedia not adobe).

> Bandwidth isnt really an issue its the CPU utilisation that increases
> and stays at a disproportionately high level, compared to other
> applications. 

I see.  So you're mainly looking for a way to reduce flash plugin's CPU
usage?  

> On the server RAM side we always allocate slightly higher
> than suggested amounts of RAM per thin client session, so I don't know
> if less/low amounts of RAM is an issue. Is it?

Well, if it's not an issue for you, then I guess it's not :-)


> > 	http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
> > 
> I have seen the project but I come back to the same questions about
> 'when' we could use it, that I ask myself with so many FLOSS
> projects/apps. 

I wasn't really proposing it as a solution for today.  I thought you were
looking for an approach to improve the situation and I suspect gnash or
something like it is probably your best bet.  I haven't really tested it
myself but they claim that it plays a fair bit of stuff.

> 1. What needs to be done to bring it upto the same or near comparable
> level as the Adobe player
> 
> 2. What resources does the project lack that we could look to provide

You'd probably be best to address these questions to the gnash guys.

> If someone puts a proposal together that will result in us being able to
> remove our dependency on the Adobe Flash player then I'll put
> (financial) resources to it.

If you're up for it, it might be an idea to talk to Petter Reinholdtsen who
is also interested in this, working as he does on Debian-edu:

	http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-wnpp@lists.debian.org/msg47904.html
	http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/FlashInDebianEdu
	http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/gnash

Gavin