News and announcements
Pipelight 0.2.8
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2014-12-10
The release notes are available at http://
Pipelight 0.2.7
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2014-06-04
The release notes are available at http://
Updated . Read more
More than 100.000 Downloads for Ubuntu!
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2014-05-15
We are proud to announce that Pipelight 0.2.6 was downloaded more than 100.000 times from our Ubuntu repositories. The user base of Pipelight is continually growing with every version since our initial release and we are happy to provide you with access to services which are otherwise not usable on Linux. Our initial goal was to gain access to video on demand services and this is still one of the major use cases of Pipelight, but in the meantime we have added a lot additional plugins and Pipelight is even used in corporate environments to provide Desktop sharing in Microsoft Lync.
We do not track our users and all these numbers are completely based on the information provided by launchpad itself, so that we can not measure the downloads for other distributions. Anyway, we hope that you enjoy using Pipelight and also like our future plans which we presented at the LinuxTag2014. The recordings are not online yet, but you can already take a look at our slides at http://
Pipelight 0.2.6
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2014-04-06
Pipelight 0.2.6 adds two new plugins and improves the currently supported plugins, especially Silverlight. Before we take a closer look at these changes, we would like to make two small announcements: First of all, we are currently working on GPU decoding and we already have a working prototype which decodes mpeg2 on the GPU when using the windows version of VLC as player. There is still a lot of work left, but we hope that we can support GPU decoding for flash (and hopefully silverlight) in future versions. The second news is that we are presenting a talk about Pipelight at LinuxTag 2014 in Berlin, so feel free to join us!
--[Plugins]--
We added support for the ViewRight plugin which is used by some VOD services as DRM player. The plugin is only available in a re-branded version and often ships with some custom configuration in the installer. In this release we added the Caiway version of this plugin ("viewright-
The other new plugin is the Vizzed RGR which ships an emulator to play old games. It seemed to be a bit buggy in our tests, but feel free to activate "vizzedrgr" and test it.
--[64 bit]--
We added support for 64 bit plugins in Pipelight and it is now possible to play around with the 64 bit version of flash and unity3d. There are still many issues since the 64 bit plugins tend to hit more bugs in Wine than the 32 bit versions, but we already started to fix some of them. In the mean time these plugins are considered as experimental and you need to unlock them first ("x64-flash", "x64-unity3d"). In case you are compiling pipelight on your own, you need to pass "--with-win64" to configure.
We also had to change the Wine version on Ubuntu / Debian as our previous releases were 32 bit only. The only disadvantage is that the old installation is not automatically updated to the 64 bit capable version, so that you need to execute "sudo apt-get install wine-compholio:
Note: You can not use a 64 bit only version of Wine as for example the installers of the plugins are 32 bit executable.
--[Compilers MinGW / WineG++]--
Pipelight uses MinGW to compile it's windows part causing problems with some distributions as they do not offer a cross compiler. This raised the question to support the WineG++ compiler as it just depends on a normal gcc, but using this compiler always resulted in broken executable. We were now able to track down the bug to a wrong alignment of doubles inside of structures with WineG++ and implemented a workaround. It is now possible to use WineG++ to compile the 32 bit version of pluginloader.exe and no cross compiler is needed any more (the 64 bit version is still broken).
--[Silverlight User Agent]--
The infamous user agent check of Silverlight always caused problems when a user agent other than Firefox was detected resulting in obscure errors like applications get stuck loading at 99%. We now implemented a hack to always return Firefox as User Agent to the plugin independently from what browser you are using. In the ideal case you should now be able to disable the user agent switcher in your browser. Anyway, some websites will still check the user agent with some kind of javascript before the plugin is loaded so that you still need to keep your user agent switcher, but you will be able to use for example a Chrome Windows user agent in Chrome. This is especially useful for websites like Maxdome which do not work as expect if you fake a Firefox User agent in Chrome.
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If you want to see all the changes in detail please take a look at the the full changelog:
https:/
Pipelight 0.2.5
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2014-02-22
The Pipelight version 0.2.5 introduces some new plugins and adds some code to make the windows part more compatible with different Mingw32/64 versions. Unlike the previous releases the number of changes is quite small and the reason for this is that we are currently working more on other Pipelight related parts than the code itself.
Pipelight is used by many users (over 52.000 downloads for 0.2.4.2 on Ubuntu) with different distributions which makes it quite time expensive to maintain all the different packages. There is currently no build service which supports all the distributions that are supported by us, so that we need to use different services with different version control systems and different input formats. Some distributions are completely unsupported by any build server like avlinux or they support only the stable version of a distribution, so that we always had to hack around these restrictions. To solve these and many other problems, we created our own build system and started with the distributions which are currently unsupported. We try to keep the old repositories if possible, so that everyone will still receive updates, but support for new distributions will most probably be available through our self hosted repositories. There are already some first results of our self created build system: Prebuilt packages for Arch Linux, correct packages for Debian jessie / sid and packages for Mageia 4. Moreover we also decided to build pluginloader.exe for every commit so that you can still test every git version of Pipelight without installing MinGW. You can grab the files at http://
Although the source code changes were quite small, there is one noticeable plugin addition: npactivex. This plugin is a wrapper to execute ActiveX plugins in browsers supporting the NPAPI, which, in combination with Pipelight, can now be used on Linux. Anyway, npactivex is not really capable of executing all kinds of ActiveX plugins, but is focused mostly on chinese banking websites. Most of the banking websites there require an ActiveX control for the login interface, so it is not even possible to use them on Windows machines with other browsers than the Internet Explorer. Anyway, as npactivex is only a wrapper plugin, you will still need to install the ActiveX plugin into the wine prefix used by Pipelight and it also requires a browser extension which is only available for Chrome / Chromium. You can find the necessary instructions on how to achieve this at http://
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If you want to see all the changes in detail please take a look at the the full changelog:
https:/
