Pipelight

Question about other plugins

Asked by Andy Franks

Just wondering if the generic plugin approach meant that any other windows plugins would work? In particular, the flash version for windows is sooo much more stable, even running in firefox under wine than the native older version, so this would be an ideal candidate for me..
I realise it's mostly silverlight for now, and am extremely grateful for the hard work of the devs on this.
Thanks

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Andy Franks
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Michael Müller (mqchael) said : 		#1

Hello Andy,

we simply implement a NPAPI wrapper between Windows and Linux so you are right that this should also work with other plugins. We do not clearly say this since Plugins often have obscure behavior and browsers implement many workarounds to get plugins working. Ideally plugins should pay attention to the Browser API and not the opposite, but this forces us to also implement this obscure workarounds. When we started the development of Pipelight our goal was to allow loading multiple plugins, but than we noticed that it is hard to get all plugins working at the same time and focused on Silverlight.

Nevertheless Pipelight is still able to load other Plugins by setting some values in the config file and I tried to load Flash. After editing a couple lines of code I was able to play some flash games and watch a youtube video, but there are still some bugs inside since Flash uses some NPAPI functions which are not used by Silverlight therefore they are untested yet. Anyway I believe that these bugs shouldn't take to long to get fixed and we can publish a new version with unofficial flash support. Unofficial since Pipelight can currently only load one plugin at a time and you must decide whether you want to use Silverlight or Flash. You will need to manually install Flash and change the config, but I will publish some instructions for this. It will allow us to do some beta test till we find a solution how we can easily create packages that support multiple plugins.

Michael

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Andy Franks (eefranka) said : 		#2

Hi Michael,
  That's fantastic. I'll sit tight for now then and keep my eyes on the project page!
Thanks again
andy

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Michael Müller (mqchael) said : 		#3

Hi Andy,

just a short update: Flash works now for some days with Pipelight and I couldn't find any issues so far. Since some plugins and especially Flash are known to have a lot of security issues we are currently working on a sandbox to protect your Linux system against malicious code and viruses. We will continue to work on the sandbox and push out the new version in some days. The sandbox won't be active by default but it should be possible to activate this experimental feature. So just wait a bit more and you will be able to use flash with Pipelight.

Michael

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Michael Müller (mqchael) said : 		#4

Hi Andy,

the new version is published now. You can find the instructions how to enable Flash at https://launchpad.net/pipelight/+announcement/11996

Michael