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up vote 6 down vote favorite

When I encounter a flash video in ubuntu I get an option to install 3 different swf players:

  • Adobe
  • Swfdec
  • Gnash

Which is the most stable and preferred player?

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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Adobe Flash.

It might be slow but it's still the best of the lot still for feature compliance and stability.

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I have made progress using Gnash day to day though it needs a workaround (disable cookies for youtube) to play youtube videos. I would say stick to the adobe plugin for now. – NightwishFan Oct 18 '10 at 7:54
up vote 3 down vote

You forget Lightspark. But none of these alternative is really stable and they will usually work on few videos and crash on the others. If you watch lot of video I suggest you stick to Adobe Flash, if you don't watch a lot of videos and don't play online flash videos games Lightspark and Swfdec are good.

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Actaully it didn't appear in the selection screen for 10.10, but thanks for your advice. – grm Oct 18 '10 at 12:45
up vote -1 down vote

It really depends on many factors. I have the best user experience with the Adobe version.

However if you are using a 64bit version of Ubuntu, it might be tricky to set up Adobe flash. There's a shell script that helps you in that process. Download it and use these commands in terminal:

wget http://queleimporta.com/downloads/flash10_en.sh
sudo bash ./flash10_en.sh

There are couple of updates and modifications to that script you can find it here.

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3  
I really wouldn't recommend using that script. Whilst not purposely malicious as far as I can tell, I can see at least one error (killall -9 firefox should be killall -9 firefox-bin). Why not just use the adobe flash PPA (ppa:sevenmachines/flash) that has a native 64bit build? – Nick HS Oct 18 '10 at 11:27
1  
Nothing against the PPA it's just not known by everyone. I learned now as well. Thanks for sharing. Maybe you might write a wiki that could be beneficial for everybody who just facing the problem. – AndyB Oct 18 '10 at 11:35
flashplugin64 has been removed from ppa:sevenmachines/flash. Any alternative? – RockScience Apr 21 '12 at 21:36

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