Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

[Chris Peterson]

The Firefox Nightly channel now uses Shumway to play Flash videos on
Amazon.com. The Shumway team has been improving compatibility with Flash
video players and will whitelist more Flash video sites soon.

Shumway will play Amazon's "Product Tour" and user-submitted review
videos like these:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JG8GOWU (Click the Kindle "Product Tour"
button on the left.)

http://www.amazon.com/review/RIWNO96MF2QVV

Note that Shumway will *not* play Amazon's "Instant Video" films and TV
shows. Those videos use Microsoft's Silverlight plugin for DRM.

This test is restricted to the Nightly channel on Windows Vista+ and OS
X. Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on
Windows XP or Linux.

If you have any questions, please drop by the #shumway IRC channel. If
you'd like to test Shumway on more websites, you can install the full
Shumway add-on that is not limited to Amazon.com here:

http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/


chris
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[Eric Shepherd]

Congratulations! There may be a lot left to do, but this is a huge accomplishment and y’all should be proud.

On February 12, 2015 at 9:26:35 PM, Chris Peterson (cpet...@mozilla.com) wrote:

The Firefox Nightly channel now uses Shumway to play Flash videos on 
Amazon.com. The Shumway team has been improving compatibility with Flash 
video players and will whitelist more Flash video sites soon. 

—

Eric Shepherd

Sr. Technical Writer

Mozilla

Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/

Twitter: @sheppy

[Justin Dolske]

Nice!

How will plans for Shumway interact with users who don't have Flash installed (such at myself)? For the most part I'm not missing it (ads!), but OTOH it would be nice for specific cases where a site does need Flash for something useful.

Also, does Shumway indirectly rely on Flash being installed (ie, so a page can detect it via navigator.plugins and such)? Curiously, Amazon seems to already do HTML5 fallback for the example product tour. Works the same for me in Nightly with shumway.disabled set to true, as well as in Firefox 35.

Justin

[Chris Peterson]

Shumway is not a first-class plugin (yet), so it doesn't show up in navigator.plugins. If you don't have the Flash plugin installed, websites that rely on navigator.plugins for plugin detection won't know that you have a Flash-compatible Shumway installed. If you do have Flash installed, Shumway hooks into Firefox's click-to-play handler to override Flash (for sites that match the "shumway.swf.whitelist" pref). If the whitelist pref is "*" then Shumway will override Flash (unless you click the orange "Shumway X" overlay to fallback to Flash).

Shumway will become a real, out-of-process plugin when "jsplugins" bug 1092119 lands. johns started jspulgins in 2014 and bz will land them soon-ish. Then Shumway will show up in navigator.plugins as "Shockwave Flash" and plugin detection will work without having Flash installed.