NSPluginWrapper 1.1.0
I had a happy Saturday so remaining crash bugs for features brought in this release did not disturb me much. I could still keep a positive mindset during those grmpf <censored> debugging sessions… Thanks! nspluginwrapper 1.1.0, a snapshot from the development branch, is now available. However, please note that since it is work-in-progress, you will only find source code here and no binary packages. Besides, the download link is at the bottom so that you can read the whole stuff about 1.1.0, a snapshot towards 1.2.0.
Here is a short list of changes since 1.0.0, details to follow:
- Add support for windowless plugins (Flash Player 10 beta 2)
- Add standalone plugins player (
nspluginplayer) - Restart plugins viewer on error (Martin Stransky)
Windowless plugins support. Windowless plugins are now supported in Firefox 3. Only Flash Player 10 beta 2 and a modified DiamondX plugin were tested. There currently is no means to disable windowless plugins but at compile-time through the ALLOW_WINDOWLESS_PLUGINS macro in npw-viewer.c. This can change in the future if there is a need to do so.
Standalone plugins player. nspluginplayer is a new application that enables you to execute a plugin without a browser. This can be useful for Flash presentation or… simply debugging. The player does not emulate the whole NPAPI but enough is implemented to support Flash Player, Acrobat Reader. Well, this is because I only tested those actually.
Usage is very simple: nspluginwrapper embed-args whereby embed-args are the arguments from an <embed> tag. Here are some examples to demonstrate the program.
- Play a Google video:
$ nspluginplayer style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7309713943323243972&hl=en-GB" flashvars=""
- Play a Flash game:
$ nspluginplayer src=http://magic.pen.fizzlebot.com/magic-pen.swf width=800 height=520
- View a PDF document:
$ nspluginplayer src=/path/to/some/file.pdf
Auto-restart plugins. The plugins system is now restarted when an error is encountered. This is not fully automatic though. i.e. if a plugin crashed, you have two options to restart it: (i) reload the page, (ii) wait for a refresh requested by the page (through some javascript or whatever triggers an NPP_New() call). You no longer have to restart the browser!
Downloads. nspluginwrapper 1.1.0 is available as source code only. You can get packages from your distributor or build your own. RPMs are really simple to get: rpm -tb nspluginwrapper-1.1.0.tar.bz2 will generate binary RPMs in your usual tree.
What's next? The plan is to get the final nspluginwrapper 1.2.0 within the next 3 months, but I can't predict in what mental state I will be by this time. Another major feature I want for this release is the Java Plugin2 (from Java SE 6 Update 10). I actually started to work on this one but for some weird reason, it seems there are still dependencies on XPCOM. Well, it wants the browser nsIServiceManager. Since I don't want to write a test plugin, I will need source code, or more happy days. 
