[Openchrome-users] Slow performance with Flash player

Tue Jun 26 06:56:14 PDT 2007

On 6/25/07, Gregoire Gentil <gregoire at gentil.com> wrote:
> 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...

Flash for windoze sucks as well, I tried it on the one that came
preinstalled on my laptop, and is even worse that on linux.
Considering it uses Via drivers and all... I think it won't get better
that that.

> - 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.

I can force my Mobile Athlon 64 to run at 800MHz and videos at Youtube
still run at reasonable fps (10fps at least) full screen.

> - 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.

I'll try this, mplayer works really good with my K8M800 (I haven't
even patched mplayer).

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

The petition should be an improved Flash version (not only a Linux one) ;-)

Gonzalo

> 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)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > 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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> > End of openchrome-users Digest, Vol 20, Issue 23
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> >
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