the end of life for flash player (HTML5)

[Kevin Kofler]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> The string "video" doesn't occur anywhere in the current Arora git.
> Can you point me to more information?

See QtWebKit, which is part of Qt >= 4.4 and supports HTML 5 video in Qt >=
4.5. Arora uses QtWebKit.

> In testing I find that a couple of problems:
> (1) it appears the it doesn't begin until it has completely
> transferred the file(?)
> (2) audio plays but video does not
> (3) seeking does nothing

QtWebKit's HTML 5 support apparently needs a lot of improvement. :-(

One issue is that there are multiple Phonon backends (Phonon is the Qt
multimedia framework, which QtWebKit uses for video playback), Qt Software
doesn't test with the xine-lib backend which is the default in KDE, whereas
the developers of Amarok and some other KDE apps recommend only the
xine-lib backend and test primarily with that one. There are also other
technical issues with the GStreamer backend, i.e. the one which Qt Software
recommends (whereas the Amarok developers say it's extremely buggy and
should never be the default), which prevent us from making it the default
(the bugs with Amarok, but also issues with how output selection is
implemented, they use a backend-specific "GStreamer sink" setting in
addition to the standard output device setting in the Phonon API, with the
result that, last I checked, it didn't work out of the box with our default
PulseAudio setup).

        Kevin Kofler