Sunday 30th December, 2007 @ 4:36 pm
I agree with Lubos. Flash sucks. However, most of us have or want to use it for things like YouTube or watching badgers.
As you may be aware the latest versions of Flash depend on XEmbed support which Konqueror lacks without various patches to KDELibs and KDEBase which haven’t been applied by my distribution and I couldn’t get working even when I manually patched the necessary parts of KDE myself. I was using the older versions but it appears they have outstanding and actively exploited security holes that they have only fixed in the XEmbed-supporting versions.
Mike needs his YouTube fix without haxors running rife on his box. Who can save him?
KMPlayer to the rescue!
KMPlayer is my media player of choice as it allows you to trivially switch between XINE, MPlayer and GStreamer backends and, as of version 0.10.0, has a nifty backend that allows you to use XEmbed-supporting plugins, including Adobe’s Flash plugin, which can then be embedded in Konqueror to allow Flash to work trivially.
HOWTO:
- Install KMPlayer (version 0.10.0c or higher). It is included in all the major distributions I’ve ever used. Ensure it is installed/compiled with the “NPP” backend enabled which allows the playback of Netscape XEmbed plugins (this depends on your distribution).
- Run KMPlayer so it creates its config file. Close it. (This step probably isn’t necessary but it won’t do any harm)
- Run the following commands:
kwriteconfig --file kmplayerrc --group "application/x-shockwave-flash" --key player npp
kwriteconfig --file kmplayerrc --group "application/x-shockwave-flash" --key plugin /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
- Change the “libflashplayer.so” section depending on where the Adobe Flash plugin was installed on your distribution. The above example is where it is installed on Gentoo. (People have replied below with where it is stored on various systems. If you can’t find yours, you probably have a locate program installed so trying running “locate libflashplayer.so” for an idea.).
- Open Konqueror and click “Settings > Configure Konqueror…”. In the new window navigate to “File Associations” in the left-hand panel and select “application/x-shockwave-flash“. Click the “Embedding” tab and click “Add..“. Select “Embedded MPlayer for KDE” from the new window. If it is not there then you may need to restart KDE or run “kbuildsycoca” from a terminal. Close all the opened windows.
- Enjoy a working Flash in Konqueror!
What is wrong? You’re running a x86_64 machine (like me) so the above doesn’t work? Never fear! If you manage to get a 32-bit version of “knpplayer” (the small program that runs the plugins) and install that in your $PATH before the 64-bit version then it will all just work like magic! Note that you’ll need 32-bit versions of the various dependent libraries also (it seems just to be GTK, Cairo, X11 and DBus stuff).
Posted in Software Development
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Tuesday 25th December, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
I hope everyone has a great day today regardless of if you are celebrating the holiday or not. If you are celebrating Christmas then spare a thought for if this Jesus guy actually did what the Bible says he did, what does that mean for you?
Have a good day people!
Posted in Christianity
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@ 1:51 am
Made my first KDE commit in over a month tonight to work improve the rich-text handling in KOrganizer’s incidence editors. I’ve also used the some of today (Christmas eve, sad I know!) to get KDE4 running as my desktop.
So far I’m pretty impressed with the stability and the new features. KWin’s AIGLX support is a welcome addition giving some of the “bling” of Compiz/Beryl on top of a featureful and stable window manager. The only real thing I’m missing so far is some of the old features of Kicker such as allowing me to change the size of the taskbar but this is not a big deal and I think the new panel is far more attractive than Kicker ever was.
Now that I actually have a working desktop of this stuff I think I’ll be committing more often as I’ll be eating my own dog-food for a change. I attempted to post this post using KOrganizer which unexpectedly crashed so I’ll work ASAP on fixing that and improving it to meet my purposes, hopefully managing to resist the temptation to do so tomorrow/today!
Posted in Software Development
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Friday 21st December, 2007 @ 3:24 am
I was out today for our team meal which turned into a team drink which turned into going to Liquid, one of the few clubs in busy Ipswich.
You can see some pictures here.
It was a good night and I enjoyed myself. My KDE t-shirt got a few odd looks earlier on in the evening with people being evenly spread between calling me a huge nerd as a compliment and calling me a huge nerd as an insult 
Anyway, heading to Liquid was pretty good banter, got to dance like a fool with some mates and get high on Red Bull whilst trying not to pass out from the really bad body-odour.
I’m far from easily shocked or a particularly morally conservative but I was pretty disturbed by the majority of videos for the dancey songs being just women dancing insanely suggestively in their underwear. I just don’t really see why they are like that. There tends to be more women than men in clubs and certainly more women than men actually dancing so I’m surprised more women aren’t bothered by how insanely one-dimensionally they are being portrayed by the flashing images above the dance floor. I don’t really know what I think should be done or even if anything should be but I find it a bit odd.
Perhaps I’m just not the target audience but I find absolutely nothing attractive about the videos at all. Looks are important but when they are focused on so soley (as in the videos) it is a massive turn-off to me .
I like going out clubbing and dancing and having a laugh with mates but it really bothers me sometimes. If men (outside of early-era Take-That, Relight My Fire is the gayest video ever) can seem to produce videos where they aren’t mindless sex-objects then why is the role reversed seemingly every time a woman is on screen?
Discuss!
Posted in Music, My Life
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