[Openchrome-users] Slow performance with Flash player

[Gregoire Gentil]

Your (our) problem is that Flash on Linux sucks... We did some
investigations on that problem and unfortunately, I came to the
conclusion that there is nothing simple to do.

- Flash on Linux is very basic. It just outputs on the screen without
using any video driver acceleration: you can't use the video hardware
scaling for instance. Usually, you can play the Flash video in a tiny
window but when you enlarge the window, you are stuck with a jerky
video...

- C7 can go up only to 1.5GHz and that's not enough to play a fullscreen
Flash video using Flash player v9. For instance, you can't put a Youtube
in fullscreen without getting jerky output.

- It's not a problem of RAM but a problem of processor speed. Even an
Intel processor is borderline as your results below confirmed it.

- As we are developing a C7 platform and we want our customers to use
Flash, I started to hack Flash so that it's replaced in an HTML page by
mplayer. The result is quite good. Here is how it works:
* when a website like youtube wants to play a Flash video, a Firefox
script replace the Flash HTML object by another HTML embed object.

* This new HTML embed object plays the Flash video but use
mplayerplug-in instead of Flash.

* mplayerplug-in uses mplayer which supports the Flash video codec.

* mplayer can use the right video hardware scaling acceleration or
whatever if you system is well configured.

Then you can play Flash video in fullscreen using 30% of CPU with a C7
while you are 95% on a 2Ghz Intel processor!!!

Two conclusions from this experiment:

# As long as Adobe will not consider seriously Linux, there will be
problems like this.

# The solution I present above is a HACK. It's dirty. It's working only
with Firefox + MPlayer + Mplayerplug-in. And the replacement of the tag
is per website only. It's not generic though there is an architecture
using gnash that would be generic.

If somebody has any idea - beyond starting a petition for an improved
Linux Flash version :-) -, it's very welcome to share,

Gregoire


 On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 12:00 +0200,
openchrome-users-request at openchrome.org wrote:
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>    1. Re: Slow performance with Flash player# (Brian Candler)
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> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:25:27 +0100
> From: Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Openchrome-users] Slow performance with Flash player#
> To: openchrome-users at openchrome.org
> Message-ID: <20070625082527.GB20318 at uk.tiscali.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 10:23:53PM +0100, Brian Candler wrote:
> > I'm finding that playback of streaming video with Flash player 9 seems very
> > slow - in the range 1 to 4 frames per second - and I was just wondering if
> > there's anything I can do to speed it up. To demonstrate, I use this site:
> > http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/video/info.shtml
> > (click on "Click here to start")
> 
> FYI, as a comparison, I've just installed Flash 9 on another PC at work.
> This machine also runs Ubuntu 6.06 and has 512MB RAM, but has a gruntier
> processor (Intel P4 2.8GHz) and a different video controller:
> 
> 0000:01:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE]
> ...
> (**) I810(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
> ...
> (II) I810(0): VESA VBE OEM: Intel(r)865G Graphics Chip Accelerated VGA BIOS
> (II) I810(0): VESA VBE OEM Software Rev: 1.0
> (II) I810(0): VESA VBE OEM Vendor: Intel Corporation
> (II) I810(0): VESA VBE OEM Product: Intel(r)865G Graphics Controller
> (II) I810(0): VESA VBE OEM Product Rev: Hardware Version 0.0
> (II) I810(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) 865G
> (--) I810(0): Chipset: "865G"
> 
> It gives a *much* better frame rate - although it still leaves 0% idle CPU
> time during playback.
> 
> So maybe video playback really does just require a decent processor.
> 
> On my home machine: is there any easy way to confirm that OpenChrome has
> acceleration enabled? e.g. is there a 'show status' command, or a standard
> benchmark?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Brian.
> 
> 
> 
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