Gnash 0.88 has been released yesterday. Gnash (or GNU Flash Player) is an open-source Flash player. With this latest release, they have made a great leap by supporting all YouTube videos. Yes this means that you do not have to install the proprietary Flash player from Adobe to enjoy YouTube videos. Gnash is available as a standalone player as well as a plugin for browsers like Konqueror, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium etc.

Although the YouTube compatibility is the most exciting thing with this release. It not the only thing about this release. Some of the new features are:

• Ability to switch renderer (Cairo, OpenGL, and AGG) at runtime.
• Ability to switch media handler (FFmpeg and Gstream) at runtime.
• Hardware video decoding with the VAAPI library.

If you are comfortable with compiling from source, you can grab the source code from here.

And for Ubuntu users execute the commands below:

(Note: The PPA has not been updated with 0.88 at the time of writing this.)

Warning: This is an unsupported PPA. The software may break.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnash/ppa

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install gnash