Fresh Player Plugin Sees New Release (Pepper Flash Wrapper For Firefox)

As you probably know, the latest Adobe Flash Player is available on Linux only via Google Chrome (it's bundled with it) while other browsers such as Firefox are stuck with an old 11.2 version.

The Adobe Flash Player plugin that's bundled with Google Chrome is in the form of a PPAPI (or Pepper Plugin API) plugin and Mozilla isn't interested in adding support for it. Because of this, Rinat Ibragimov has developed Fresh Player Plugin, a wrapper that allows Linux users to use Pepper Flash from Google Chrome in Firefox and other NPAPI-compatible browsers.

A new Fresh Player Plugin version - 0.2.2 -, has just been released, bringing various improvements and new features:

• implement Flash DRM interface. (Desktop PepperFlash doesn't use it, you need one from ChromeOS);
• fix malfunctioning nested submenus;
• implement file chooser dialog;
• fullscreen fixes, stop crashing on Alt-F4;
• rework ALSA code, add optional PulseAudio support;
• implement screen saver inhibition interface;
• use GLX to create GL context, for both GL and GLES;
• fix hangs caused by wrong nested message loop handling;
• add quiet config option to decrease amount of output;
• fix Referer bug;

The most important change in this release is obviously the implementation of Flash DRM interface however, Pepper Flash that's bundled with Google Chrome has the DRM-related code disabled on Linux so to use this, you need to extract Pepper Flash from Chrome OS, and that's a pretty tedious process (instructions available here).

Furthermore, to get the Flash DRM interface to work, you must add "enable_3d = 1" to the freshwrapper.conf file or else you'll get a black video, even on non-DRM content.

Here's a Flash DRM test screenshot with the latest Fresh Player Plugin and Firefox, under Ubuntu 14.10:

I should also mention that I've been using Fresh Player Plugin with Firefox for months, and pretty much everything works, though I only use a few Flash websites.

Note that according to its GitHub page, Fresh Player Plugin "mostly works, but some essential APIs are still to be implemented", so it may not work with some websites.

For more information about Fresh Player Plugin, bug reports, etc., see its GitHub page.

Getting Fresh Player Plugin

If you use Ubuntu / Linux Mint and derivatives, you can install Fresh Player Plugin by using the main WebUpd8 PPA. For installation and configuration instruction, see: Install Fresh Player Plugin In Ubuntu Via PPA (Pepper Flash Wrapper For Firefox)

Arch Linux users can install the latest Fresh Player Plugin (Git) via AUR.

For other Linux distributions, you'll have to compile it from source.