About

PPAPI-host NPAPI-plugin adapter.

As you know, Adobe have suspended further development of Flash player plugin for GNU/Linux. Latest available as an NPAPI plugin version 11.2 will get security updates for five years (since its release on May 4th, 2012), but further development have been ceased. Fortunately or not, newer versions are still available for Linux as a part of Chrome browser, where Flash comes bundled in a form of PPAPI plugin. PPAPI or Pepper Plugin API is an interface promoted by Chromium/Chrome team for browser plugins. It's NPAPI-inspired yet significantly different API which have every conceivable function plugin may want. Two-dimensional graphics, OpenGL ES, font rendering, network access, audio, and so on. It's huge, there are 111 groups of functions, called interfaces which todays Chromium browser offers to plugins. Although specs are not final yet, and new interface versions are arising, with some older ones getting deleted; rate of change have significantly slowed down.

For various reasons Firefox developers are not interested now in implementing PPAPI in Firefox. However that does not mean it cannot be done.

The main goal of this project is to get PPAPI (Pepper) Flash player working in Firefox. This can be done in two ways. First one is to implement full PPAPI interface in Firefox itself. Other one is to implement a wrapper, some kind of adapter which will look like browser to PPAPI plugin and look like NPAPI plugin for browser.

First approach requires strong knowledge of Firefox internals, and moreover additional effort to get the code into mainstream. Maintaining a set of patches doesn't look like a good idea. Second approach allows to concentrate on two APIs only. Yes one of them is big, but still graspable. Second way will be used for the project. It will benefit other browsers too, not only Firefox.

Status

Mostly works. Looks like all essential APIs are implemented.

Known issues

described here.

Security note

All available Pepper Plugin API documentation usually accompanied with assertions of enhanced security due to active sandboxing usage. It's worth to note, that API itself doesn't make any sandboxing, it's only allows sandboxed implementations. This particular implementation doesn't implement any sandbox. That means if any malicious code breaks through plugin security, there is no additional barriers. This is the same level of security as NPAPI Flash have.

Install

Project is using cmake (>=2.8.8) build system.

• Install prerequisites.

    $ sudo apt-get install cmake gcc g++ pkg-config ragel libasound2-dev \
           libssl-dev libglib2.0-dev libconfig-dev libpango1.0-dev       \
           libgl1-mesa-dev libevent-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxrandr-dev      \
           libxrender-dev libxcursor-dev libv4l-dev libgles2-mesa-dev    \
           libavcodec-dev libva-dev

• (optional) To enable PulseAudio support, install libpulse-dev.

• (optional) To enable JACK support, install libjack-jackd2-dev and libsoxr-dev

• Create a build subdirectory in the root directory, from that folder, call

    $ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ..
    $ make

• Put generated libfreshwrapper-pepperflash.so into browser plugins directory (~/.mozilla/plugins)

When loaded by browser it will search for libpepflashplayer.so in a directories where it can be: in Chrome (stable/beta/unstable) directory, and in /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree/ (pepperflashplugin-nonfree puts it there). It should be enough to get it running, but if it doesn't, specify full path in ~/.config/freshwrapper.conf. You may find sample configuration file in /data. It's better to have manifest.json alongside with libpepflashplayer.so, actual Flash version will be taken from that manifest.

Hardware-accelerated video decoding code requires relatively new version of libavcodec (January 2013, version 54.39.0). If you don't have it yet, code won't compile unless you disable hwdec by WITH_HWDEC=0. To do so, change configuration step command to:

    $ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DWITH_HWDEC=0 ..

Note, even if built, hardware-accelerated video decoding is still disabled by default. You need to explicitly enable it in configuration file.

License

The MIT License. See LICENSE file for full text.

Directory 3rdparty/ contains source code from 3rd parties which can be distributed under other license terms. See source code for details.