Gnash 0.8.5 released

The fourth beta of a free (as in freedom) SWF player has been released.

It is now supporting even more ActionScript classes. It can now play more SWF v9 files. It now has better support for viewing videos on Youtube. And the free will to save streamed FLV straight from Gnash would -- but of course, most of these average had been using other tools to get their FLV but didn't they just wished that Adobe Flash Player could have simply provided this feature instead?

Sadly, Free and Open Source supporters that still use Windows still has to wait for a Windows build.

How to build Gnash on Windows (Part I) UPDATE Oct 29, 2009

You have stumbled to this blog/guide so I assume the you know what Gnash is.

As I write this article, there's only Gnash 0.8.2 for Windows yet that version is months old from the latest build, which is 0.8.4.

With MinGW already installed on my Windows box, I wanted to build the latest version of Gnash.

I tried to look for some other guide on the net but there seem to be none or I'm just too lame to find one. So this will be my small documentation on building Gnash on Windows.

Part I

0. Updating MinGW

Gnash requires GNU Autoconf 2.61. And GStreamer requires Autopoint 0.17.

UPDATE: MinGW port of Autoconf 2.63 has been officially released, not sure if it works with Gnash, though.

1. Getting the source code

You can get the source from the official releases or from its Bazaar repository by typing:

bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnash/trunk

You can get a Bazaar client for Windows from Bazaar-VCS.org.

2. Downloading the dependencies

*PNG from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net

*JPG from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net

*FLTK from http://www.fltk.org

*GIF (1 and 2) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/giflib

*XML2 from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net

GStreamer from http://www.gstreamer.net

*Simple Directmedia Library from http://www.libsdl.org

Anti-Grain Geometry from http://www.antigrain.com

Boost from http://www.boost.org

*CURL from http://curl.haxx.se

* Source to dependency files has been proven to be compatible to Gnash 0.8.4

3. Downloading NSPR

I used the NSPR that is on LaunchPad; the one that will be used for Ubuntu Jaunty -- this one (nspr_4.7.3.orig.tar.gz).

Gnash is using NSAPI that's why we need to build NSPR, and compiling NSPR requires NSINSTALL, yet there's no NSINSTALL from the MinGW. We have to get it from Mozilla Build. But it's 39MB and all we need is the nsinstall.exe. If I know how to compile nsinstall from source then I will let you know, but I don't. Now if you trust me, I am offering the same nsinstall.exe (14 KB) from Mozilla Build.

Extract nsinstall either from Mozilla Build (or from the link I gave you) to your MSYS bin directory. Then extract NSPR to MSYS home directory if you haven't already.

You are now ready to compile NSPR. Just type the following on MSYS console:

cd nspr*/m*/n*
configure
make

There'll be a dist directory which will contain three other directories (bin, include, and lib). Move all the content to root directory of MSYS (c:\msys\1.0\{here}).

If you are not having luck compiling NSPR, you might want to download a precompiled NSPR from my stash.

That's it for Part I, I'll have yet to know just how to prepare this dependencies in Part II.