Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: flash (Page 12 of 13)

VLC 2.0.6 (finally) released. New flash plugin too.

April 12, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I almost finished a bottle of La Trappe Dubbel and before I pass out, there is just this one post to write at the end of another busy week.

VLC Media player

I don’t know how many times during the past two months I thought “I have to start preparing for a new VLC package build” only to discover that the developers side-tracked again and a new release was not going to come after all.

But finally, there it was this week: vlc-2.0.6. This is a bugfix release, notable changes for us Linux users include “support for Matroska v4, improved reliability for ASF, Ogg, ASF and srt support, fixed ALAC and FLAC decoding“.

I finally updated the npapi-vlc browser plugin. I noticed that version 2.0.6 was tagged in the repository and still no release tarball is being made available… get serious, you french! I heard good stories about the new version, so I decided to checkout a snapshot from git. I never really fancied the 2.0.0 release of npapi-vlc and use gnome-mplayer / gecko-mediaplayer instead.

Actually, this is the second build of the packages. Someone notified me that there was an issue with the libupnp plugin (uPnP service discovery) so I upgraded the internal library and applied a patch.

Where to find my new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

 

FlashPlayer-plugin

WIth all the fuss about vulnerable browser plugins (Java is the bad boy) I was quick to update my Flash Player packages. when I saw that Adobe had released a new security bulletin…See http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb13-11.html for the list of CVE‘s they plugged this time. Better safe than sorry folks – always watch out what web pages you visit!

After upgrading, use the following URL to check that you are indeed running the latest version of the Flash Player plugin: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ .

Have fun! Eric

 

Update to Flash Player plugs vulnerabilities

February 12, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Adobe issued a security bulletin for their Adobe Flash Player. On APSB13-04 two CVE’s are mentioned – CVE-2013-0633 and CVE-2013-0634. Of those two, CVE-2013-0634 is the vulnerability which affects Linux users, because it is being exploited “in the wild” in attacks delivered via malicious Flash (SWF) content hosted on websites that target Flash Player in Firefox.

There is an update available for Chrome browser (update to the latest release please) and for the Flash Player plugin for Firefox. I have a package for that flashplayer-plugin and therefore I pushed an update so that you can “safely” use Flash content again in Firefox.

Mind you – if you are using the beta Steam Client for Linux (i.e. the client for Valve Software’s gaming platform) you will have a package for that flash player because it is used to display the video content in the Steam client. If you use Steam on multilib Slackware64 then you will have a “compat32” package of that flashplayer-plugin – do not forget to update that one as well!

Packages for flashplayer-plugin 11.2.202.270 can be obtained (and used on Slackware 13.37 and higher, and perhaps even older releases) in the following places:

After the package upgrade, restart Firefox and visit this website to verify that your Flash Player Plugin is indeed the correct version: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

Eric

New VLC and FlashPlayer releases

December 15, 2012 / / 7 Comments

Just a saturday afternoon post… I intended to write about these updates earlier, but I had a very busy work week which did not leave room for Slackware PR. Now that my two-week holiday has started, I have my hands free to work on software updates, my ARM port (which is again threatening to shrivel up and die, I am so much behind on -current) and I also want to put some serious work to a viable Slackware setup for Valve’s Steam client for Linux.

VLC Media player

The sixth version of VLC’s “Twoflower” (codename for the 2.x series), is “a minor update that improves the overall stability. Notable changes include improved reliability for MKV file playback, fixed MPEG2 audio and video encoding … and other fixes. It also resolves potential security issues in HTML subtitle parser, freetype renderer, AIFF demuxer and SWF demuxer.” – quoting the VideoLAN news page.

I checked the release notes page for 2.0.5 but was a bit disappointed that they just re-used the 2.0.4 release notes, changing “2.0.4” to “2.0.5” which means the release notes page is just bogus.

Can anyone tell me how the new “ogg opus” support works for you? This new codec is supposed to replace other low-bandwidth codecs like speex but I have not seen any real-life cases.

When the IRC developers channel mentioned earlier this week that the 2.0.5 release was nearing completion, I compiled the VLC “dependencies” tarballs in advance. Remember that I have to create 8 VLC packages when VideoLAN developers release a new version of their player (two Slackware releases, two architectures per release, and then restricted/unrestricted versions of each). The pre-compiled binary tarballs  of statically-compiled dependencies or “contribs” speed up the process of creating these packages a great deal. The main update to these “contribs” for the new packages is for the ffmpeg libraries: I switched to the git snapshot which is considered the best available version by both VLC and at least one MPlayer build team.

A note about BluRay support: I do not own a BluRay player, not BluRay disks or “downloaded” movies. The BluRay support in VLC (at least in my package) works only for unencrypted disks… and I do not think these exist actually – but I can not verify this. If you are able to playback BluRays please let me know about your experiences. Playback of encrypted BluRay DVD’s requires that you also install my libaacs package: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libaacs or http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libaacs/) and find yourself a set of AACS decryption keys (see these comments for some hints on that).

Where to find the new VLC packages:

Rsync acccess is offered by the mirror server: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ .

My usual warning about patents: versions that can not only DEcode but also ENcode mp3 and aac audio can be found in my alternative repository where I keep the packages containing code that might violate stupid US software patents.

 

FlashPlayer-plugin

I also upgraded my Flash Player packages. Adobe plugged another set of critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-5676, CVE-2012-5677, CVE-2012-5678) and if you are using a Mozilla-compatible web browser to watch Flash content, upgrading is strongly recommended. For more details, check here: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb12-27.html .

After upgrading, use the following URL to check that you are indeed running the latest version of the Flash Player plugin: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ .

Have fun! Eric

 

KDE security fix, Flashplayer 11, random bla

October 4, 2011 / / 6 Comments

KDE team have issued a security advisory (CVE-2011-3365) for the KSSL component in KDE 4.6 and 4.7. I have applied the proposed patch to fix the security hole and updated packages for kdelibs are available from my ktown repository, for both KDE 4.7.1 and KDE 4.6.5 (because I intend to keep that release for a while, it works very well with Slackware 13.37).

Direct links to the packages follow, but you can check out any of the available mirrors of course.

KDE 4.6.5:

KDE 4.7.1:

The new KDE 4.7.2 wich is right beyond the corner will have this fix incorporated.

 

Then there is the Adobe Flash Player.

Finally we have a Linux flash player for both 32bit and 64bit that is on the same terms as the MS Windows version. Yesterday, Adobe announced the official release of their Flash Player release 11 for all platforms. Some of you will cheer, others will moan, but nevertheless this is a milestone in 64bit Linux support. It was (in part) because of the availability of 64bit Flash for Linux that I started the 64bit Slackware port in 2008.

I have packages for you here:

Or on any of my package mirrors, like:

 

And Slackware-current, some people are speculating on huge updates in the near future because there has been such a long silence on the update front. Please do not get too disappointed if the amount of updates is not as big as you might hope. Sometimes, there is real life to take care of.

 

And then there was this:

I am pondering about another blog post, but the idea has not yet finalized in my mind. What it boils down to is, how should I digitize my rather big library of vintage Science Fiction books? I have many tens, maybe a hundred books that certainly will never be released in digital format, and I am looking at the tools to make the conversion. Slackware packages for all the (OCR and scan cleaning) software that I think I will need have been compiled but I hesitate to release them. Mainly because I have not yet tested them myself… ideas are welcome, especially ideas about how to go about the scanning process (I do not want to cut up my books). More to follow!

Cheers, Eric

Package updates in the past days

September 11, 2011 / / 24 Comments

I have been updating some of my Slackware packages in the past few days and at least some of them are important enough to write a bit about it.

virtuoso

Along with my packages for KDE 4.7.x I added an updated version of virtuoso “data management server” which powers a lot of the functionality in today’s KDE: However there was a regression in this version 6.1.3 which messed up the display of path names containing non-ascii (i..e Unicide) characters. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271664 for more details about this issue. I applied a fix to my virtuoso-ose package which solves this.

Package available here in the 4.7.1 section: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ as well as all the usual mirrors.

kde-workspace

Martin Graesslin wrote an email to the KDE packagers mailing list with the plea to apply a patch to all binary packages of kde-workspace after he discovered a bug in KWin’s handling of desktop effects which apparently has been present in all versions since 4.0. The bug would cause a performance degradation which becomes worse when more windows are open on the desktop. Martin’s blog article describes how he discovered the bug during his performance analysis of KDE 4.8 code. I have applied the patch he provided in his email to my KDE 4.7.1 kde-workspace package and I will wait for a backport to KDE 4.6.x before attempting to apply the fix to the kdebase-workspace package in there.

Package available here in the 4.7.1 section: http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/ as well as all the usual mirrors.

vlcgit

This is not a package update per sé. I have been compiling the development version of the VLC media player for a long time (I think I started re-writing the vlc.SlackBuild script for the development snapshots in January 2011). I had varying success with the package, as my build script would “break” from time to time. When someone in the #videolan IRC channel wondered if the development code would work better for high-bandwidth H.264 movies (VLC 1.1.11 drops too many frames) and a VLC developer suggested that the development code has a lot of optimizations in this regard, I decided to release a package based on my SlackBuild script. I called the package directory “vlcgit” and the build script “vlcgit.SlackBuild” but the actual package is named “vlc” so that you can easily update from 1.1.11 to this development snapshot. The vlc program will identity itself as “1.2.0-git” when it starts. I think it is worth your while to try it out because there have been lots of enhancements and additional features in the past year.

VLC 1.2.0 is expected to be released before the end of 2011.

Packages here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlcgit/ (which is a US server so these packages do not contain the mp3 and aac encoders because of patent disputes) and at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlcgit/ (for the version that includes mp3 and aac audio ENcoding capability). Also available on all the other mirrors of course.

flashplayer-plugin

The Adobe people are finally putting good effort into their Linux flash player plugin. One month after the “beta 2” release we now have the “release candidate 1” of the upcoming Flash Player 11. It looks like the releases for Linux and Windows platforms go hand in hand now, which is a reassuring sign that we Linux users are taken seriously.

Package available at http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/

calibre

The calibre download page states that you should “not use your distribution provided calibre package, as those are often buggy/outdated. Instead use the Binary install described below“. Of course you are free to follow that advice, but if you prefer to know how your packages get built, like me, you can still grab the packages that I provide. There is a new release of Calibre every friday and I have been following that release cycle for the past months, releasing updated packages the same day. I use Calibre every day and am happy with my builds.

Get the package here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/calibre/

sigil

If you are seriously into writing or converting e-books, then Calibre is the perfect management and conversion software for the task. But Calibre does not offer an actual epub editor. Epub is an open specification for electronic books and widely used all over the world except for the US apparently where Amazon dominates with the mobi format used for its Kindle. Both mobi and epub formats are quite similar, basically it is HTML text plus a book’s metadata, bundled together in a ZIP archive. Whether you are writing an ebook yourself, or need to clean up an ebook provided by someone else, there is one application which is best suited for this task: Sigil. Sigil is designed to edit epub format only. It contains an embedded HTML tidy which cleans up the book’s HTML code autimatically and an embedded Flightcrew, which assists you in validating your book to the EPUB specification.

The Sigil homepage offers pre-built binaries, but these are quite big. Since they have to work everywhere the binaries include a lot of libraries which we already have in Slackware. The new Sigil maintainer seems to be very responsive so I asked him if he could put up a page with distro-specific packages and add a link to my Slackware package there. He did that right away, and more distros have been added there since.

Get the package fir Sigil here: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/sigil/ .

 

Good fun with all of this! Eric

Update Sun Sep 11 15:43:06 UTC 2011:

libbluedevil

Willy Sudiarto Raharjo pointed out that there was another package update and I failed to mention it. The 32bit package “libbluedevil” was not tagged with my “alien” tag initially, and I fixed that by renaming the affected files in the repository.

Remember why tagging your packages is useful? If you use slackpkg to keep your Slackware up to date, then you can blacklist all my packages (since I apply the “alien” tag to all my packages) so that slackpkg does not “see” them anymore. Add this single line to the file “/etc/slackpkg/blacklist“:

[0-9]+alien

🙂

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