Adobe® recently announced they have (temporarily) stopped working on the amd64 version of their Flash™ Player for GNU/Linux.

The previous releases contain a big security issue, which makes them totally unusable.

As I didn’t want to wait until the flashplugin-nonfree package to be updated to support the i386 plugin through nspluginwrapper (as suggested in #586273), I have decided to simply switch to the free alternative: gnash.

After a few hours with it, I am now able to use most of the websites I usually visit, including Youtube and Dailymotion.

Note that I use Iceweasel, which does not support WebM (for now), nor H.264 (which will never be supported by Mozilla).

Youtube support is brought by a Greasemonkey user script available at: http://turanct.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/gnash-youtube/
The only tiny drawback is that the videos load in pause mode. For now, everything else seems to work fine.

Users of other browers (Chromium, Safari, Opera) can try their HTML5 beta: http://www.youtube.com/html5

It is even easier for Dailymotion, as the videos on their HTML5 beta program are encoded in the Ogg Theora format, which is natively supported by Iceweasel/Firefox >= 3.5.

To ease things, I have written a small Greasemonkey script which simply automatically redirects www.dailymotion.com to openvideo.dailymotion.com. This script can be downloaded here.

The drawback is that videos won’t play before they are loaded completely, which is not a big problem anyway.

I still cannot play the videos avilable on Vimeo, and have noticed while wirting this post that the Flash™ file uploader of WordPress didn’t work with gnash (obviously, WP provides an alternative way for file upload).

I will go on with this experience as long as I do not see major issue with gnash.
I will also update this post, or add comments, if I encounter other issues, or find any alternatives.

I would be curious to read your comments if you have run similar experience.