Flash video doesn't have true a full-screen mode

Bug #164897 reported by Bogdan Butnaru
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
flashplugin-nonfree (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Hello! This is about latest Gutsy. Consider it a feature-request rather than a bug.

On Mac OS X, the Flash player has a very nice feature: when pressing the full-screen button, the Flash window fills up the screen completely. This mode can be exited by simply pressing the Esc button, and a message saying this is automatically overlayed on the screen each time, so the user is well aware what they're looking at and how to quit it.

On Ubuntu (and, I think, pretty much everywhere else), the behavior of the full-screen button is very different: a new browser window (or tab) is opened, with the address set to a page that is filled with the Flash player. (Try this on youtube, for example.) This is bad for two reasons:

(1) It interrupts the video play (or whatever the Flash player was doing), re-starting it from the beginning. Often it also causes re-loading of the video (the part that was loaded already in the 'small' player), though this is more of a browser/Flash problem.

(2) The resulting window still has the browser's controls around it, meaning that the video (or any content) is not truly full-screen. (This is generally a good idea, for security & usability reasons, but the Mac OS X behavior is better.)

I haven't picked an affected package, since I'm not sure which is the best way to fix this. It could be either hacking Flash (hard, since it's proprietary, but they might be persuaded to add something to the flashsupport library for this), modifying Firefox (hard, since it's big and complex), or some hackish wrapper around the plug-in (which seems to me the likeliest option). It might even be possible to make some kind of Compiz hack that simply zooms the resulting window on the whole screen (though this only solves problem (2), and would decrease the quality a bit).

(BTW, I'm willing to work on this is someone can mentor me through.)

Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)
description: updated
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Mehmet Köse (decaf) wrote : Adobe works on it.

Only owner can fix proprietary software. Adobe added this feature to latest beta.

Revision history for this message
Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb) wrote :

Your first question is true, but that doesn't mean we can't work around it and change how it actually behaves.

But I'm not sure I understand the second part. Is there an official beta version of the Flash player, different than the one that's installed automatically through the repositories, which can do real full-screen no Linux, or are you talking about the Mac OS one?

Revision history for this message
Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb) wrote :

Sorry, I meant sentence, not question.

Revision history for this message
Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb) wrote :

And again, sorry, I just found out the new beta on the Adobe site. Since Hardy is in alpha state, shouldn't flashplugin-nonfree actually install the beta version?

Revision history for this message
Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb) wrote :

Changed the status to Invalid, a newer version that the one discussed here is already released. It seems they're working on the full-screen mode at the moment.

Changed in flashplugin-nonfree:
status: New → Invalid
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