Friday, September 23, 2011

Super omnibus update: 7.0 RC, updated QuickTime Enabler, and Floodgap is back up

Well, heck, let's start with the good news first. AT&T installed the T1 on Monday and DSL Extreme activated it earlier today, so Floodgap and its associated projects, including TenFourFox.com, is back online. Point your friends, enemies, rather less good enemies of theirs and friends of those people's less good enemies to it.

The T1 comes at (naturally) a substantially greater hosting cost; though it is amortized against using it for my other projects and as my regular means of Net access, it's still a pricey (but very smooth and low-latency) way of getting hosts online compared to DSL or cable, neither of which were practical options for reasons many of you already know. As a policy matter I do not accept project donations as this has the risk of encouraging expectations I and the other contributors can't satisfy, but I am considering allowing Blogger to put ads on this blog to make a little of the money back. I won't object if you Adblock them away, of course.

Mozilla has signed off on the 7 release candidate, so now we have our release candidate available ahead of Firefox 7's formal launch on September 27th. As with previous release candidates, if there are no showstoppers then this will become the formal release. There is one small fix in this version (in addition to Mozilla's fixes): because Floodgap was down there was nothing to post update snippets against, so this fix adds the 7-specific update checks. As a result, there is also a new set of changesets for builders. Read the release notes and grab for your architecture:
Also available, as promised in the previous blog entry, is a new version of the TenFourFox QuickTime Enabler. If you are new to the QTE, please see this blog entry for basic instructions; in short, the QTE allows you to play certain media types outside of the browser in QuickTime, including H.264 video (which Firefox can't play at all) and most other audio and video files by right-clicking and selecting Open Media in QuickTime. In alpha-45, here's what's new:
  • Updated for Gecko 7 (alpha-43 will not work with 7.0)
  • Overly long URLs don't cause garbage characters in the URL dialogue anymore; they will simply be truncated (but will still play)
  • If you are not offered the QuickTime option initially, start to play the video. When the video appears and starts, right click again and see if the option is offered then. If it is, and you open the file in QuickTime, the enabler will now automatically stop the video in the browser (if possible) so that you aren't playing it in two places. This should enable JavaScript-based video code that tries to detect browser capabilities to also be playable in the Enabler.
Download QTE alpha-45 and drop it on your browser window to enable it. It does not require a restart. Remember, this add-on is still in testing and development.

"One more thing." Many of you will have read the press coverage about the "BEAST" SSL chosen plaintext attack demonstrated at ekoparty this weekend. Virtually every browser is vulnerable to this; Opera has already released a patch and Chrome has one in testing. Note that Mozilla and Chrome share SSL code (i.e., they both use NSS), so the same fix is likely to appear in Firefox, but it is not currently in 7. There is substantial argument about how easy it is to pull off in practice, but certain things can make it easier, and we might talk about this once Mozilla goes public with a final determination.

Man, it's good to be online again.

18 comments:

  1. And here I thought I was smart for enabling FIPS, disabling SSL 3.0, and only using TLS 1.0 (*smacks head*).

    Anyway, glad you're back online. It may take a bit for things to propagate so that the main site is visible everywhere again, or I may need to clear my browser cache, because I'm still getting the down notice.

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  2. Great, back online! Will have a look at 7RC later this day and start working on the German localization.

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  3. i am impressed at how flash players performance keeps on improving with every tenfourfox release. on my emac 1.42ghz with 2gigs of ram i can now watch full-screen YouTube at 360p with no sign of laq what so ever. i am blown away at how smooth flash is working now. i almost had to pinch my self. awesome work man.

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  4. WooHoo! Thanks for the release. 7.0 is absolutely flying on my G5! Keep at it!

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  5. Amazing work! RC7 is a fast dream on my G4 upgraded Pismo Powerbook, nearly twelve years old and still awesome. Thanks, so much.

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  6. Art, it's probably something with the host redirector. By now their end should be all caught up.

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  7. The apex of fastness. Can't possibly get any faster on my computer.

    I think future updates will bring new features and bug fixes, but the speed has reached its peak and is incredibly responsive.

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  8. Once again, awesomeness abounds, Tenfourfox 7.0 runs incredibly fast on my ibook G4.

    So I've discovered something which may be of interest, or it may not be...either way I'd thought I'd share. I have the flashvideoreplacer extension in tenfourfox and honestly it sucks on the mac compared to linux, doesn't load the video in quicktime properly either in the browser or outside. On a whim I tried copying the url to the clipboard (from the flashvideoreplacer extension control button in the address bar) and pasting it into quicktime and hey, whaddayaknow it works, launches and plays youtube video and a lot of other sites similar to the haxie you have been working on. Then....I thought, would this work with say, the amazing and incredible CorePlayer, and yes, it does. I can now stream 720p on my ibook G4. I thought there might be the germ of an idea here, I can't code worth crap but maybe someone who reads this blog can.

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  9. Dave, which URL? (I'm not personally familiar with FlashVideoReplacer.) Perhaps the QTE can snoop on the same URL and hand that to QT Player also.

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  10. Not the url of the webpage, its the url of the stream, for instance I just played this 720p file in coreplayer:

    http://tc.v3.cache8.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?sparams=id%2Cexpire%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Cratebypass%2Ccp&fexp=909323&itag=22&ip=98.0.0.0&signature=CE45B52933E7D8465B28BC61C8F4BFAA8321D9C2.9C9E8830DC351EB2753C7AF5B73A1830A6CF2DFF&sver=3&ratebypass=yes&expire=1317110400&key=yt1&ipbits=8&cp=U0hQTFFMTl9FSkNOMF9JRlJFOjZ1OWZwRTRBQmh5&id=f7c1c59df2f32ac5

    After copying it from the extension, which has a little drop down menu that controls preferences, allows you to download the video, or paste that url into the clipboard. I simply go to quicktime (VLC's Open Network function works as well) or coreplayer and paste in that url, and it streams...

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  12. Also, a poster in the PPC macrumors forum (Nova77) states he can do the same thing using Mactubes, that is, start a download, then drop the file on his desktop onto CorePlayer. I believe he said he can do 1080p files with a dual processor MDD.

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  13. Fantastic. I have tweeted it and posted it to the LEM staff. Let's keep this project alive.

    It is amazingly fast on my iBook G4 1.07Ghz running Leopard. Flash too, I can now watch YouTube vids without much lag.

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  14. Thanks, Simon!

    I know people are delighted with the Flash performance, but I stress as always that any improvements you may perceive are entirely accidental and the support level remains unchanged, viz., zero.

    Dave, I might try to borrow the code from the add-on that seeks out the stream, especially if QT can indeed play it. Look for that in the next alpha of the QTE.

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  15. Also, parenthetically, the RC has been finalized.

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  16. That's great Cameron, one more nail in the coffin of Adobe Flash!

    Simon, you should try out the above method, I bet you could watch the very same videos with no lag. I am very pleased HD video is not beyond my reach, even though I don't really need to watch Lady Gaga in HD. Come to think of it, I don't need to watch her at all.

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  17. Just stopping by to confirm what dr.dave said about me. 1080p is indeed possible on my G4 dual 1.42 MDD, when the encoding process is well done. (At least, youtube's standard is not bad).

    Since MacTube's download function allows CorePlayer to read any file while it is downloading (so, pretty much streaming-like), and given how easy I guess it would be to get flash download links vs streaming links..... would there be a way to make a firefox add-on that generates flash download links AND automatically opens the files in CorePlayer at start?

    I bet that would not require any CorePlayer knowledge to just select and associate a certain file type with a particular app... And if its too complicated, we could just go in CorePlayer's prefs and allow it to be the default player for all HD video files (.mp4, .mkv etc).

    I know there are some plugs out there that give download links, they would need some more polishing to fit our needs...

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  18. Just in case some coder passes by and feels like building a CoreAVC tenfourfox addon to make tenfourfox even better.... and kill whats left of flash video...
    Here is the development SDK page. Says compatible with PPC 32/64 bit. Probably the same used in CorePlayer OS X.

    http://www.corecodec.com/products/coreavc

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