• From: Beeton, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-01-05
  • Posts: 383

Topic: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

I've checked my bandwidth.. it's 5MBit down and about 700kbit up. Not great but decent. Why oh why does my P4-3Ghz play flash so smoothly while my brand new dual core lappy will not. I've tried both regular resolution and hd resolution youtube videos.

I've even tried playing a *local* flash file (one of my screencasts) from the hard drive (so bandwidth is not an issue) and it's completely unwatchable. It plays for a few seconds and then gets so choppy that it's about 0.25fps.. or about one frame every 4 sec!

Running system monitor along with it I see that it's pegging one of my CPU's constantly (which I've read isn't that unusual). I've tried it with both Firefox and Epiphany and they're both choppy as heck.

Anybody got any ideas what my problem is here?

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  • kBang
  • #! Die-hard
  • Offline
  • From: Calera, AL, USA
  • Registered: 2009-01-06
  • Posts: 774

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

rfquerin wrote:

I've checked my bandwidth.. it's 5MBit down and about 700kbit up. Not great but decent. Why oh why does my P4-3Ghz play flash so smoothly while my brand new dual core lappy will not. I've tried both regular resolution and hd resolution youtube videos.

I've even tried playing a *local* flash file (one of my screencasts) from the hard drive (so bandwidth is not an issue) and it's completely unwatchable. It plays for a few seconds and then gets so choppy that it's about 0.25fps.. or about one frame every 4 sec!

Running system monitor along with it I see that it's pegging one of my CPU's constantly (which I've read isn't that unusual). I've tried it with both Firefox and Epiphany and they're both choppy as heck.

Anybody got any ideas what my problem is here?

Compositing + Flash = catastrophe - Just a wild hunch.

I view KDE like I view snow. It looks fun and marvelous, it's fun to play in, but after a while I just want someone to take it all away.
  • From: Beeton, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-01-05
  • Posts: 383

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

Ixnay on the compositing.. I get the crappy Flash playback with or without compositing it seems. sad

My Blog: http://blog.rfquerin.org
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  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

Completely uninstall Flash and reinstall from the Adobe site (comes in .deb package).

Note: ** Please read before posting **

BTW if you wish to contact me, send me an e-mail instead of a PM.
  • From: Beeton, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-01-05
  • Posts: 383

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

anonymous wrote:

Completely uninstall Flash and reinstall from the Adobe site (comes in .deb package).

I did this, but it hasn't seemed to help at all.

I dual boot Jaunty Beta on this laptop so I booted into that and with exactly the same flash-plugin version (10.0.22.87-1) the same sites worked flawlessly. But in #! it's choppy as hell.

I don't think it's an Nvidia driver issue as full size videos play wonderfully.

Now when you said completely uninstall Flash.. I only had one package in Synaptic to remove which was the 'adobe-flashplugin' package. I hit 'Completely Remove'  before downloading and installing the deb from Adobe's site. Are there extra steps maybe to uninstalling it that I might have missed?

My Blog: http://blog.rfquerin.org
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  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

No, that shouldve done it.

Do you have an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (live cd)? I would check if its choppy there too.

Note: ** Please read before posting **

BTW if you wish to contact me, send me an e-mail instead of a PM.
  • From: Beeton, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-01-05
  • Posts: 383

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

anonymous wrote:

No, that shouldve done it.

Do you have an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (live cd)? I would check if its choppy there too.

I put in the crunchbang live CD and flash played buttery smooth. It sounds like it's something I've done that's screwed it up.

My Blog: http://blog.rfquerin.org
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  • Registered: 2009-01-29
  • Posts: 61

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

Hey,

I didn't want to start another topic for pretty much the same problem, albeit on a different setup.

I'm running #! 9.04 on a Dell Inspiron 6000 (Intel Pentium M 1.7 GHz, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility M300), and Flash is choppy as hell. In addition, CPU usage spikes to 100% and the core temperature goes (in a few seconds) into 90+ degrees (Celsius). In short, it's impossible to watch any kind of flash media.

I tried Philip's suggestion in some other thread for a similar problem:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude remove adobe-flashplugin && sudo aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree

But it didn't work. The Flash version I now have installed is 10.0.22.87ubuntu2 (The latest on the Adobe site).

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

  • From: Beeton, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-01-05
  • Posts: 383

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

I found out later that the flash plugin was not necessarily the main problem (I now use the flashplugin-nonfree), but it was also largely a video card driver issue. I have an Nvidia card in my laptop and the driver on the live CD played flash fine, while the driver I had installed in my full setup did not. So maybe check the video card driver you're using and see if using a newer or older version makes a difference.

My Blog: http://blog.rfquerin.org
Screencasters: http://screencasters.heathenx.org
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  • Registered: 2009-01-29
  • Posts: 61

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

rfquerin wrote:

I found out later that the flash plugin was not necessarily the main problem (I now use the flashplugin-nonfree), but it was also largely a video card driver issue. I have an Nvidia card in my laptop and the driver on the live CD played flash fine, while the driver I had installed in my full setup did not. So maybe check the video card driver you're using and see if using a newer or older version makes a difference.

That could be it.

I tried playing a Youtube video off an Ubuntu 9.04 (Not #!) live CD, and the exact same thing (choppy Flash with 100% CPU usage) happened.
For the record, this used to happen in #! 8.10.02 as well, but not all the time.

When I bring up the restricted drivers manager in my present install, there is no option for an ATI (or AMD) proprietary video driver for my graphics card, and the open-source drivers are evidently in use.

How do I downgrade/upgrade my video drivers?

  • From: Beeton, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-01-05
  • Posts: 383

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

karthik wrote:

That could be it.

I tried playing a Youtube video off an Ubuntu 9.04 (Not #!) live CD, and the exact same thing (choppy Flash with 100% CPU usage) happened.
For the record, this used to happen in #! 8.10.02 as well, but not all the time.

When I bring up the restricted drivers manager in my present install, there is no option for an ATI (or AMD) proprietary video driver for my graphics card, and the open-source drivers are evidently in use.

How do I downgrade/upgrade my video drivers?

I've never owned an ATI card.. for NVidia, you can get drivers off the Nvidia site (they have binary Linux drivers). Maybe ATI has the same thing?

My Blog: http://blog.rfquerin.org
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  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

@karthik - iirc ATI has stopped support for older Radeon cards (I think yours might be one) so thats why Jaunty doesn't offer a driver for it.

You can try this driver (though I dont know if it will work):

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/l … ng=English

Note: ** Please read before posting **

BTW if you wish to contact me, send me an e-mail instead of a PM.
  • Registered: 2009-09-21
  • Posts: 1

Re: Choppy Flash.. is it just me?

Hey everyone.

I managed to solve this issue on my machine. I have Intel 915GM graphics.

This adobe blog is really the key:

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008 … e_gpu.html

The flash player does the unbelievably brain dead thing of checking the glxinfo vendor strings to make sure they do *not* contain the string "SGI". Flash hardware acceleration will only be enabled if the vendor strings do not contain the string "SGI". Incredible, huh? I guess this is the kind of idiocy we've got to contend with in closed-source binary blobs.

The advice given in one of the comments actually worked for me. Specifically, use a hex editor (such as 'ghex') to alter these two binaries:

/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so

(or the actual binaries these files link to, if they are symbolc links. They were links on my system.)

They each contain one instance of "<null>SGI<null>" (plenty of the string "SGI" in other contexts, but ignore these). Change the single instance in each file to "<null>ATI<null>". Restart X, and you may just have hardware accellerated flash. It worked for me.

big_smile