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Adobe have recently stopped updating their Flash distribution for Linux. So, version numbers are being frozen at 11.2(.212), and only security updates are being back-ported.

I noticed here that Chrome has a "pepper-based Flash player", which has the same version number as the latest Windows and OSX flash players (11.5.31.2 at time of writing).

In the last couple of weeks, my favourite watch on-demand TV player (4od - I think is UK only) has stopped working in Firefox and Rekonq; I suspect because of a Flash version check. Chrome plays the videos I want to see; Firefox, Opera and Rekonq do not.

So, is it possible to install (and keep up-to-date) this pepper-based flash player in other web-browsers? Or, is there any other way to spoof the version check and play protected content in other web-browsers?

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It is possible to install it in Chromium. But I doubt very much it will work with other browsers. I suggest you just use Chrome. Firefox is working on something called Shumway but that's some way away. – vasa1 Dec 10 '12 at 12:55
Thanks. Guess I'll have to move to Chrome for streaming videos... By the by, do you know if Chrome and Chromium use Adobe's source code for their Flash implementations? Seems harsh that Adobe would allow Chrome/ Chromium to use and distribute a Linux binary, but disallow anyone else from doing the same, whilst hardly maintaining it themselves... I guess Google would have paid Adobe a lot of money for the rights.. – Alex Leach Dec 11 '12 at 2:51

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I'm afraid you;d have to dig into the flash plug-in source code. One option would be Gnash. However, it'd probably get quite hard-core.

It might be better to check whether some flash-downloaders understand the sites you want to watch and then download the videos for off-line viewing. One example of such a program is cclive. You may just need to write a simple script video link from the page.

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Don't know about digging into flash plug-in source code.. I thought it was all closed-source anyway? Good suggestion on the downloader. I later saw someone had done just that, and created a swf downloader for 4od. Still, seems like that'd get tedious very quickly, cf. using the Flash-based web UI – Alex Leach Dec 11 '12 at 2:44

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