Gnash

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For the hockey team mascot, see Gnash (Nashville Predators)



Developer:	Rob Savoye
Latest release:	0.7.2 / November 17, 2006
OS:	Cross-platform (many Unices and Microsoft Windows)
Use:	Media player
License:	GPL
Website:	www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Gnash is a GNU project to create a free software player and web browser (Mozilla-based and Konqueror) plugin for the Adobe Flash format. Currently the player can play Flash files, called SWF, up to version 7 and some of SWF 8–9 (most Flash on the WWW is SWF 7). Most other free software Flash players can only play up to SWF 4. The current version of Adobe's proprietary Flash player for GNU/Linux can also play up to version 7 (whereas the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X versions can play SWF 9). There is currently a beta of Flash 9 available for GNU/Linux [1]

1 History
2 Technical details
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

Writing a free software Flash player has been a priority of the GNU project for some time. Before the launch of Gnash, the GNU project asked for people to assist the GPLFlash project.

Gnash is a fork of the public domain source code of the GameSWF project. The primary distribution terms for Gnash are those of the GNU General Public License, but code developed by the Gnash project which might be useful in GameSWF will be placed in the public domain.

The project was first announced by software developer John Gilmore. Its main developer is Rob Savoye.

[edit] Technical details

Gnash requires either AGG, Cairo, or OpenGL for rendering. Another attribute inherited from GameSWF is that the software is written in the programming language C++; this is in contrast to most GNU projects, which are typically written in C.

Currently, some of the platforms Gnash is able to be compiled and run on are: x86, AMD64, MIPS/Irix, and PowerPC GNU/Linux and Net-/Open-/FreeBSD. Adobe does not provide an official player for any of the platforms listed above except GNU/Linux on x86. As yet unintegrated ports exist for RISC OS [2], which never had Macromedia/Adobe Flash support, and BeOS [3], where support terminated at Version 4.