Posts Tagged ‘swf’

A Black and White Story and To Download an Apple a nice artistic videos produced by a friend

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Here are two really nice videos produced by Daniela Popova.

One is called Black and White Story and the other one is with the funny name To Download an Apple

The videos was produced for her Graduation assignment in NATFA (National Academy of Theater and Film arts).
Even better the Black and White Story Video has been selected for the Festival of the Orthodox Christian Cinema in Moscow.
The movie was selected by a the jury on the festival (a professor) who realized there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind the Black and White Story

The Black & White Story Video has also an outstanding bulgarian national folklore music combined with some modern day music, just check it out and enjoy.

The second movie To Download an Apple is a humorous one and I believe presents the sometimes stupid and serious efforts we do to follow fake imaginative goals.

Black and White Story

Daniela | Myspace Video

Black and White Story


To Download an Apple

As Daniela is a Christian the movies contain also a hidden Christian messages 😉
I greet her for the great work! Considering the uniqueness of the videos it’s obvious Daniela is really talented!
I’m looking forward to see some more from her works.

New critical Adobe Flash Player security flaw allows a malicious attacker to get access to Windows, Linux, Mac OS and BSD

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Flash swf Player artistic logo exploit

A new zero-day exploit for the Adobe Flash Player has been published on http://exploit-db.com .
The exploit published is targetting Windows 7 systems.
Even though the published version of the exploit is said to affect Windows 7 installations, the shellcode with this proof of concept exploit (PoC) could surely be changed to a one that would also take effect in Linux.
Most likely Linux exploitation will be a harder task to achieve, however thesecurity advisory issued http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa11-02.html recommends an immediate update of the flash player.

According to some rumors the 0 day adobe flash vulnerability has been exploited since a long time to get access to confidential U.S. governmental documents.

A classical ways said that malicious hackers uses is by sending a flash (.swf) containing email, by simply opening the email attachment the victim gets exploited.

Adobe officially has reported, there are no official information if attacks has targetted other company software like Adobe Acrobat Reader which supports embedded flashes.
According to Adobe Adobe Reader is not vulnerable to this kind of attacks as it uses a protected mode which would mitigate the attack (though I hardly doubt this claim).

The affected versions of Adobe’s Flash player are:

  • Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Windows
  • Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Apple Macintosh
  • Flash Player 10.2.153.1 for Linux and Solaris
  • Flash Player 10.2.156.12 for Android Mobile platform

as well as the Authplay.dll library used by Adobe’s Acrobat Reader

Earlier versions of Flash player are also affected by the critical security vulnerability.
There are already rumors that the exploit is exploited using a crafted (.swf) files embedded into Microsoft Word .doc files.

This new critical vulnerability is another example clearly showing how insecure a user who has flash enabled in their browser is.

According to preliminary information, exploitation of this critical security flaw can be sucessfully achived in most (if not all) browsers …

By so far browsing on Linux was always considered to be a way more secure than on Windows, with this issue rising up this kind of believe is questioned.
Surely many Linux distributions and FreeBSD and BSD derivatives used as Desktops will probably not package timely newer version of the adobe flash (flashplugin-nonfree) package on time

Today the flash player is a de-facto standard and is wide spread among most modern internet connected operating system obviously it’s unificated use, creates unified problems.

The example with this flash security issue is a good example against why non-free technologies should not be set as standards.
If the flash player and standard was free and everybody could create and distribute flash players for free. Such a vulnerability affecting so many operating systems and so many browsers would never come true

To sum it up, this issue will surely create a lot of problems and opens a serious security hole for us the Linux users.

Therefore be sure to update your flash player before someone has exploited you through the web.

Best software available today for Linux video Desktop capturing on Debian

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

I’ve been experimenting since some time in order to understand better what is the current situation with Video Desktop Capturing Software available today for Linux and FreeBSD.

My previous investigations has led me to write an article about xvidcap called How to make Video from your Linux Desktop with xvidcap

Though xvidcap works pretty well, it is currently uncapable of capturing the audio stream of a Linux Desktop env and hence part of the interactivity of the videos is missing when used.

A bit of further investigation on the topic has pointed me to 3 free software programs which are capable to record Desktop environment on Linux with sound embedded

The interesting screen video capturing Desktop tools I’ve found are:

1. recordMyDesktop
2. Istanbul
and
3. vnc2swf

Installing them on a Debian based distribution is pleasable, as there are installable debian packages of each one which I installed easily with apt:

debian:~# apt-get install istanbul recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop vnc2swf

RecordMyDesktop‘s package contains a command line little tool which when started directly starts capturing video and audio of the Linux Desktop. After a Ctrl+C is pressed the program quits, saves and encodes the video in ogg-encapsulated theora-vorbis file format.

Here is the output I got in saving a sample file by launching recordmydesktop without any arguments:

hipo@debian:~/Desktop$ recordmydesktop
Initial recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1024 Height:768
Adjusted recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1024 Height:768
Your window manager appears to be Metacity

Initializing…
Buffer size adjusted to 4096 from 4096 frames.
Opened PCM device hw:0,0
Recording on device hw:0,0 is set to:
2 channels at 22050Hz
Capturing!
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
^C
*********************************************

Cached 5 MB, from 207 MB that were received.
Average cache compression ratio: 97.3 %

*********************************************
Saved 69 frames in a total of 69 requests
Shutting down..Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.

STATE:ENCODING
Encoding started!
This may take several minutes.
Pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the procedure (resuming will not be possible, but
any portion of the video, which is already encoded won’t be deleted).
Please wait…
Output file: out.ogv
[100%]
Encoding finished!
Wait a moment please…

Done.
Written 692529 bytes
(635547 of which were video data and 56982 audio data)

Cleanning up cache…
Done!!!
Goodbye!

The captured file as I you see in the above output is saved in file out.ogv

RecordMyDesktop has also a GUI interface (written in Python) called gtk-recordmydesktop

Below you see a screenshot of the GUI gtk-recordmydesktop:

RecordMyDesktop GTK interface entry screen

gtk-recordmydesktop is a super-easy to use as you already see in the picture, you can either configure it with Advanced button or use Save As button to select where you want the Desktop captured video and audio to be stored.

In Debian Squeeze 6.0, the Advanced GUI button interface button is not working but that’s not such an issue, as the rest of the buttons works fine.
After the recordmydesktop‘s Record button is pressed it will start capturing from your Desktop and the window seen in the above screenshot will disappear/hide in the system tray:

recordmydesktop recording minimized in system tray
When you press over the white little square in the system tray the screen capturing will be interrupted and a window will pop-up informing you that the captured video and audio is being encoded, here is another screenshot of recordmydesktop encoding a saved Desktop video stream:

recordmydesktop saving captured desktop video

After the final .ogv file is encoded and saved to further transfer it into (.flv) I used ffmpeg;

debian:~# ffmpeg -i test.ogv test.flv
...

Now let’s evaluate a bit on the the final results, the produced test.ogv‘s synchronization between sound and video was not good as the sound was starting earlier than the video and therefore even though recordmydesktop used to be highly praised on the net, the proggie developers still needs to do some bug fixing
Further on, I continued and (gave the other Desktop screen capturer) Istanbul a try hoping that at least with it the video and audio of my Linux desktop will be properly captured. But guess what, the results with Istanbul was even more unsatisfactory as the produced videos and sounds, were slow and a lot of frames from the screens were missing completely.
Moreover the sound which was supposed to accompany the video was completely 🙁

Thus I will skip on talking about Istanbul as in my view, this piece of software is far away from being production ready.

I also tested vnc2swf , launched it by: pressing alt+f2 and typing in vnc2swf in GNOME’s run application prompt, just to be surprised by an error …:

vnc2swf error no 111 Connection refused

The reason for this error is caused by the xserver (Xorg) port 5900 is being closed by default on Debian

However this error is easily solvable, by making the Xserver to listen to a the port 5900, to make the Xorg server on Debian to listen on this port you need to edit the file:

/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

and change inside it:

exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"

with:

exec /usr/bin/X "$@"

and either reboot your Linux or restart only the Xorg server by pressing Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace

Now let me conclude, the results from my desktop video screen capturing experiments prooved that vnc2swf is superior (as it is capable of properly saving a movie with sound and video from a Linux Desktop). It appears this soft is actually the best one you can use to make a video of your Linux desktop.

Sadly my testing has proven that Linux is still lacking behind Windows and Mac in even doing the most simple tasks …
Let’s hope that situation will get better soon and Gnome or KDE developers will soon provide us with better software capable to save properly a video and audio captured from the Linux Desktop.