Flash video & package updates

Sorry, realised this should be in the help and support section. Have reposted - please feel free to delete this.

1) Win2k is from 2000 and CrunchBang 9.04 is from 2009. Their minimum system requirements are very different.
2) Flash is proprietary (non-free) software and simply performs better in Windows than in Linux.

But hey, did you try my suggestion to download the video first?

(edit) Also it might be helpful to check what kind of graphics card you have, and if any restricted hardware drivers are available.

Last edited by snowpine (2010-05-11 22:39:27)

The laptop is a different (faster) machine. My point was simply - if Ubuntu runs flash better than XP then surely the lean, modern Crunchbang should be better than bloated and dated win 2K? Slightly drawn-out logic I know, but odd that my previous experience was that Flash video plays well under Ubuntu.

Either way I'm sure #! is capable of better performance with iPlayer than playing a few frames and simply crashing and I'd appreciate some advice on which browser/plugins are likely to work best, and how to install them. Likewise if there are any cache/buffer issues which might solve my problem.

Yes, exactly! Although it should run faster than a full Ubuntu distro, right?

Trouble is most Flash based sites either block downloads or make you set up a user account to do so. Will try and report back

As I said, DivX playback is very good.

It's some kind of ATI Rage Pro AGP, not sure of exact model nor how to check in crunchbang. Nothing listed in Restricted Device Manager.

Last edited by bluetomgold (2010-05-12 00:03:41)

I've never run Ubuntu on this machine. I looked here out of curiosity and other than here I have no idea where to find out what drivers are loaded, or available.

Last edited by bluetomgold (2010-05-12 00:19:18)

Yes, I understand that the Flash driver is proprietary. And I understand that in itself it is no better under crunchbang than a standard Ubuntu distro. And I accept that the driver may be less efficient than the Windows one. But, on a low-spec PC, I would have hoped that the less resource-hungry distro (i.e. #!) would give the machine a better chance of successfully streaming video. Is that unreasonable?

OK. I have pulled some Flash files out of my temp folder. When streaming they are very jerky even though they buffer ahead of playback. In VLC they play smooth as silk, full screen.

Last edited by bluetomgold (2010-05-12 00:44:01)

Very frustrating. I'd still appreciate some advice on upgrading Firefox and perhaps installing Chrome. Crunchbang is nice but it's not half as beginner-friendly as regular Ubuntu. And Firefox 3 clearly does have some issues if iPlayer crashes it.

If you check further down the specs you'll see that they quote equal requirements for video playback irrespective of OS. Although that's clearly rubbish. My experience is that Flash is even worse on older Macs... my girlfriend's G4 800 with 768mb won't play Flash video properly either... But my previous experiences with Flash and Linux have been good, so I'm not convinced that the only issues at play are the speed of my machine and the lousy proprietary drivers Adobe provide.

So, excuse me for being new to this, but if I add the ubuntuzilla repository to my /etc/apt/sources.list, does that mean I will automatically get updates by doing a system update (right click menu)? If not then what?

Snowpine, I do understand that you've had a similar experience and haven't managed to improve your Flash performance, but I do feel that Crunchbang should be capable of better considering how well it allows this machine to perform in general. I note with interest that I am not the only one that feels there may be specific issues with #! and Firefox and Flash:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … runchbang/

Particularly interesting: "I tried streaming directly to VLC and everything is OK, even at full screen mode."

How do I open up a stream (e.g. iPlayer, YouTube) in VLC?