Gnash Flow: LinuxFund.org Supports RTMP for Gnash

Dec 15, 2008

The nonprofit LinuxFund.org is providing financial support for Gnash, the Flash alternative, to accelerate development of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

The free Gnash player is to defy Adobe's Flash by playing Flash content from a variety of different servers. Gnash can indeed recognize different Flash content, albeit not with all Flash functionality, as has been the case up to now. The LinuxFund.org, therefore, wants to bring the software up to date by sponsoring RTMP development for Gnash.

Gnash should then be able to accept and play video streams from open source Flash servers Red5, Cygnal and Dimdim, thereby greatly increasing the number of accessible websites. Developer Sandro Santilli is to take over implementation, with development costs supported by LinuxFund.org to run at $8,500.

Gnash's lead developer Rob Savoye writes in a press release that the work will link various open media clients and servers and that the financial infusion couldn't have come at a better time. Savoye is founder and CTO of the Open Media Now! Foundation that is part of the GNU Project. Savoye summarizes the goals of the foundation: "We are promoting an infrastructure that enables the creation, the streaming, and the viewing of digital content, using free software in a legally conforming way." Among the tools that profit from LinuxFund.org support is the free LiVES video editor.

Related content

  • FOSDEM: Gnash Developer Deciphers RTMP

    Rob Savoye has been engaged in numerous projects, but in his work on Gnash, a free implementation of the Adobe Flash Player, he found a hard nut to crack: how to decipher the protocol details of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) it uses. He has now presented his solution at the FOSDEM '09 conference in Belgium.

  • Gnash

    Until recently, the Flash format has been the uncontested domain of Adobe. Gnash introduces a free Flash player for Linux and BSD with a design that aims far beyond the capabilities of Adobe’s king of the hill.

  • Gnash Readies for a push
  • The Gnashing of teeth
  • Free Software Projects

    This month, we look at free projects as a replacement for Flash and Java. Both Flash and Java are so widespread that you can’t realistically do without them, so it’s a pity that both are released under proprietary licenses. The community has started to remedy the situation.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News