Konqueror with latest Adobe Flash HOWTO
December 30, 2007 at 16:36 by Mike McQuaid
This page is outdated. In KDE4 Konqueror will work with the latest Adobe Flash plugin and there is now a 64-bit version of Flash available for Linux. I highly recommend you use one of these instead of the guide below but I’m leaving it here in case you need to use it for another reason.
I agree with Lubos. Flash sucks. However, most of us have or want to use it for things like YouTube or watching badgers.
As you may be aware the latest versions of Flash depend on XEmbed support which Konqueror lacks without various patches to KDELibs and KDEBase which haven’t been applied by my distribution and I couldn’t get working even when I manually patched the necessary parts of KDE myself. I was using the older versions but it appears they have outstanding and actively exploited security holes that they have only fixed in the XEmbed-supporting versions.
Mike needs his YouTube fix without haxors running rife on his box. Who can save him?
KMPlayer to the rescue!
KMPlayer is my media player of choice as it allows you to trivially switch between XINE, MPlayer and GStreamer backends and, as of version 0.10.0, has a nifty backend that allows you to use XEmbed-supporting plugins, including Adobe’s Flash plugin, which can then be embedded in Konqueror to allow Flash to work trivially.
HOWTO:
- Install KMPlayer (version 0.10.0c or higher). It is included in all the major distributions I’ve ever used. Ensure it is installed/compiled with the “NPP” backend enabled which allows the playback of Netscape XEmbed plugins (this depends on your distribution).
- Run KMPlayer so it creates its config file. Close it. (This step probably isn’t necessary but it won’t do any harm)
- Run the following commands:
kwriteconfig --file kmplayerrc --group "application/x-shockwave-flash" --key player npp
kwriteconfig --file kmplayerrc --group "application/x-shockwave-flash" --key plugin /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so - Change the “libflashplayer.so” section depending on where the Adobe Flash plugin was installed on your distribution. The above example is where it is installed on Gentoo. (People have replied below with where it is stored on various systems. If you can’t find yours, you probably have a locate program installed so trying running “locate libflashplayer.so” for an idea.).
- Open Konqueror and click “Settings > Configure Konqueror…”. In the new window navigate to “File Associations” in the left-hand panel and select “application/x-shockwave-flash“. Click the “Embedding” tab and click “Add..“. Select “Embedded MPlayer for KDE” from the new window. If it is not there then you may need to restart KDE or run “kbuildsycoca” from a terminal. Close all the opened windows.
- Enjoy a working Flash in Konqueror!
What is wrong? You’re running a x86_64 machine (like me) so the above doesn’t work? Never fear! If you manage to get a 32-bit version of “knpplayer” (the small program that runs the plugins) and install that in your $PATH before the 64-bit version then it will all just work like magic! Note that you’ll need 32-bit versions of the various dependent libraries also (it seems just to be GTK, Cairo, X11 and DBus stuff).
Posted in Software
Thank you very much for the information ^^
[...] Fuente : mike arthur dot co dot you kay [...]
Thank you very much for this how-to.
Didn’t work for me at first because I’m using a x64 system , but managed to fix it using a really simple method.
As you pointed out in your original post , x64 require some ia32 libs and the 32bit version of knpplayer.
It’s way easier (in Debian/sid that is) to download the 32bit packages from packages.debian.org and force install them to get the desired result.
What I did:
Download these 2 packages from here:
Did not bother with kmplayer gui since I use smplayer and kaffeine mostly.
In a terminal as root:
apt-get remove –purge kmplayer*
Go to the directory you downloaded the files and again as root in a terminal window:
dpkg -i –force-all kmplayer*.deb
The rest of mike’s how-to stand as is.
Thank you again mike really appreciated.
Thanks man, finally my Debian Etch desktops (with and without etch-backports) have flash again!
badger, badger, badger…
Thanks for a great Howto. Konqueror truly rocks!
Unfortunately some flash on some websites still doesn’t work. Playing flash on last.fm for example.
I am using Kubuntu Hardy. When I open the webpage with flash (e.g.youtube) , I get an embedded kmplayer window which won’t play the file. I can choose “play with “Iceape”" from the menu, but to no effect. Has anyone been able to get flash through KMP on Hardy? How?
Thanks!
That’s wierd… I have got media-video/kmplayer-0.10.0c with “arts cairo gstreamer mplayer npp xine” flags enabled, kde-3.5.9, net-www/netscape-flash-9.0.124.0. I do have Ice Ape in “Play with” menue, but I get nothing but a blanc embedded screen. Flash in Firefox works, however.
If I switch to console, I get followings:
entering gtk_main
windowCreatedEvent
windowCreatedEvent 0x8079cc8
using service org.kde.kmplayer.npplayer-14129 was ‘:1.20′
call /npplayer11.running()
dbusFilter :1.2 org.kde.kmplayer.backend
quit
Thankx bro.. Now my konqueror working for playing Youtube.
A note to all 64-bit users: kmplayer method works for me with konqueror-4.1.2, netscape-flash-9.0.124.0, kmplayer-0.11.0_rc4 and nspluginwrapper-1.0.0. You have to do “nspluginwrapper -v -a -i” first and use npwrapper.libflashplayer.so (in my case it was /usr/lib64/nsbrowser/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so).
Don’t know if the above works for kde 3.5 with 0.10.0 kmplayer though.
It worked fine in Slackware 12.1.
Thanks for the nice tutorial.
In reply to Erik’s comment on 4 October…
You don’t need nspluginwrapper if you put a 32-bit knpplayer in your PATH ahead of the 64-bit one.
I have Flash 10.0.12.36 working in Konqueror 4.1.2 with only KMPlayer 0.11.0_rc4 installed but no nspluginwrapper. Search rpmfind.net for knpplayer, extract the knpplayer binary out of one of the i586 RPMs, and put it in /usr/local/bin, assuming /usr/local/bin is before ${KDEDIR}/bin on your ${PATH}.
Works great with kde4.1.3.
The only downside is that Flash movies that use SSL connections don’t work. At least not for sites with self-signed certificates.
Firefox pops-up the ‘do you accept’ question, where Konqueror doesn’t and fails the connection.
I followed instructions configured flash plugin using kmplayer. But it does not seem to work with KDE-4.2 (4.1.96). Is there any tweak or patch needed to make kmplayer working with 4.2?
I compiled kmplayer from source.
Yay this fixes the problems Flash has been giving me for a while now. I have KDE 4.2.00 and running Arch x86_64. A lot of sites the Flash Plugin would load but it would just show blank, now it works perfect
@simon: suprisingly, these instructions don’t need to be modified to work on 4.2, even though they were written for 3.5
All I needed to change was the path to libflashplayer.so
it is worked but it seems slow than normal flash plugin
You’re a genius !
Thank you, your tip saved my day.
(Worked on openSUSE11.1-Konqueror4.1-Flash10, all 64bit).
Am running Kubuntu Hardy, and it’s not working for me, despite having followed instructions and even though I do get Ice Ape as one of the options in configuring KMplayer.
Not sure what’s wrong. I wondered whether something else might be interfering since I have (over the years/months) tried a few different ways of getting flash working in Konqueror ….
thank you very much for your help .