Flash

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This page contains information on Flash, a proprietary format for delivering audio and video content, primarily over the Internet.

Flash is non-free/proprietary software

Adobe's Flash plugin cannot be included in Fedora because it is not free/libre and open source software. Adobe does release a version of the Flash plugin for Linux, and this can be used in Firefox, Konqueror and other popular Internet browsers. When Adobe releases a newer version of the Linux Flash plugin, it makes packages available for Fedora, but Fedora cannot include Adobe's plugin as long as it is unavailable as free and open source software.

Free alternatives to Adobe Flash
There is a free and open source alternative called Gnash available in Fedora's software repositories. Gnash can play flash videos but the audio portion of flash is often under the MP3 format which is patent encumbered. Since Gnash uses Gstreamer, you can get additional codecs from other third party repositories but Fedora unfortunately cannot include them. There is also another free and open source alternative called Lightspark. Scroll below for more details on installing Gnash. There are other open alternatives to Flash itself, including the patent unencumbered and free WebM, Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio formats. Fedora has complete support for such open formats, and Fedora includes a version of Firefox web browser that plays Ogg and WebM (Firefox 15 onwards) files directly, without any need of third party and proprietary browser plugins.

YouTube and WebM support

Google has open sourced the VP8 video format and combined it with Ogg Vorbis audio and an adaptation of the Matroska container, creating a new format for free and open video and audio called WebM. YouTube is switching over to using WebM extensively and Fedora has embraced this format as well. Current versions of Fedora support WebM by default.

To enable support for it in YouTube, go to http://youtube.com/html5 and click on "Join the HTML5 Beta" link in the bottom of that page. Note that all videos are not available in WebM format yet, but this is expected to happen over time. Here is a sample video for testing.

Enabling Flash plugin

Adobe offers several methods to install their 32-/64-bit Flash 11 plugins. In general, the YUM version is preferred, since it allows the plugin to be updated automatically through Fedora's normal update mechanism. The YUM version simply installs the repository configuration files, after which you must install the Flash plugin separately.

To begin, refer to the Adobe site at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Select YUM for Linux to download, and confirm. This will download the adobe-release-ARCH-1.0-1.noarch.rpm file. (ARCH refers to 'i386' for 32-bit, 'x86_64' for 64-bit.)

Simply opening the file should automatically run it with rpm and ask for authentication properly. Should it fail, run following command within the directory where you have downloaded the repository rpm file.

# For 32-bit users:
su -c 'rpm -ivh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'

# For 64-bit users:
su -c 'rpm -ivh adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'

The .rpm file also copies the adobe General Public Key (GPG key) to /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux but does not import it. To import the key, type:

su -c 'rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux'

The system is now ready to fetch rpm packages from adobe using yum. To verify this, take a look at the /etc/yum.repos.d/adobe-linux-i386.repo file that was just created. You should see something similar to the following:

[adobe-linux-i386]
name=Adobe Systems Incorporated
baseurl=http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/i386/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

Notice that the file contains the URL where the packages are located, whether or not the repository should be enabled, whether rpm should check downloaded packages from adobe against the GPG key, and the location of the key itself.

(If getting the tar.gz version of either the 32-bit or 64-bit plugin, unpack it and copy it to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins. Make sure that its ownership is root:root and that permissions are set to -rwxr-xr-x. Also, as root, run either restorecon -v '/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so' or restorecon -v '/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so', depending on whether you are using the 32- or 64-bit version. The 64-bit alpha is currently only available in a .tar.gz version.)

After completing the Adobe repository configuration, run the following command to install the Flash plugin and ensure sound is enabled:

su -c 'yum install flash-plugin'

Next, you should exit all copies of Firefox and start it again to enable the plugin, and then check the plugin.

Checking the plugin

Type the following text in the Firefox address bar:

about:plugins

A section similar to the following should appear:

This information tells you that the Adobe Flash plugin has been successfully installed.

Also check the Adobe Flash Player test page

Installing the plugin on Chromium

Follow all of the instructions in the Enabling Flash Plugin section. Then:

- on 32-bit, create a symbolic link that tells Chromium how to find the 32-bit plugin:

su -c 'ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so'

- on 64-bit, create a symbolic link that tells Chromium how to find the 64-bit plugin:

- run Mozilla Firefox once so that it creates /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so

su -c 'ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/plugins/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so'

- Exit all Chromium windows and restart Chromium.

- In the Chromium address bar, type "about:plugins" to check whether the plugin loaded. You may have to re-run Chromium with the --enable-plugins command line switch to force Chromium to re-scan its plugins folder.

Installing Gnash

Fedora includes a free and open source Flash player called Gnash. Gnash is very modular and includes plugins for Mozilla and Konqueror as well as a desktop player. You likely want the Mozilla plugin.

Use PackageKit or run the following as root user

yum remove nspluginwrapper
yum install gnash-plugin

If you use Konqueror as your web browser,

 yum install gnash-klash 

If you would like to have a desktop flash player,

 yum install gnash 

Note that Flash often relies on MP3 for audio and Fedora cannot include support for it since it is a patent encumbered format. Gnash uses the Gstreamer multimedia framework and hence additional multimedia codecs can be installed separately. Third party repositories might provide such codecs.