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The Trouble with Adobe Flash
To interact with Flash elements in your browser without using proprietary software, you have two options:
- Swfdec, which has good compatibility but abruptly ceased to be developed sometime in early 2009.
- Gnash, the GNU SWF player, which is being rapidly developed and relies on the gstreamer and ffmpeg backends to perform.
YouTube
The low-fidelity video-sharing phenomenon that is YouTube started in 2005 and took the world wide web by storm almost overnight. To the dismay of Free Software users everywhere, SWF become a . The following year, Google Inc. bought out the service and has been in charge ever since. In 2010, Google started an opt-in experiment to view videos with the new HTML5 standard as an alternative to Flash. Unfortunately, the format they have chosen is the closed, patent-encumbered H.264, not an open, royalty-free format like Theora. Don't believe Google's rhetoric; this has nothing to do with the technical quality of the Theora format, and everything to do with promotion of their own proprietary Chrome browser.
