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Issue Details (XML)

Key: FP-114
Type: Bug Bug
Status: In Progress In Progress
Assignee: Edwin Wong
Reporter: DGS
Votes: 118
Watchers: 32
Operations

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Flash Player

flash player fails to properly scale and play back video

Created: 04/16/08 06:06 PM   Updated: 04/19/09 07:26 AM
Component/s: Rendering FullScreen, Rendering Performance, Video Playback
Security Level: Public (All JIRA Users )

Severity: Performance
Reproducibility: Every Time
Discoverability: High
Found in Version: Flash Player 9 - 9_0_124_0
Affected OS(s): Linux - All Linux
Injection: No
Steps to Reproduce:
Steps to reproduce:
Go to any website with flash video (such as hulu). It plays back rather poorly.
But wait! I want to see my movie fullscreen or just scaled larger.
I scale the movie from the popout player on hulu. It gets grainy, starts flickering, dropping frames, and eating up all my CPU.
What crap. I guess I'll have to download content illegally if I want decent playback.
 
 Actual Results:
 Playing any movie is done by the CPU and scaling at all or larger resolution is terrible and unusable.
 
 Expected Results:
I expect video playback on linux to used some sort of hardware acceleration, perhaps taking advantage of the XV overlay so that it doesn't take my whole CPU to see a bunch of pixelated video that's nearly unwatchable.
 
 
 Workaround (if any):
Just download in a non-flash format instead.
 
 
Language Found: English
Bugbase Id: none
Triaged: No
Participants: Chris Denley, DGS, Edwin Wong, Jerone Young, John C Harker, Luke Wheeler, Mark Miller, Martin G. Miller, rodolfo cristovao, Ryan Hayle and Sebastian Turzanski
Browser: Firefox 2.x


 All   Comments      Sort Order:
John C Harker - [04/30/08 06:57 PM ]
I agree. The problem isn't just movies, although certainly movies are the most obvious case. In general I find that flash slows down my browser, often to a ridiculous extent. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy with Firefox 3b5 on a Thinkpad G41, 1.5 GB of RAM. My graphics card (an NVIDIA GeForce Go5200) is great for most things, but is apparently not utilized running Flash. This makes any page with Flash a pain in the butt.

Martin G. Miller - [05/01/08 07:03 AM ]
Same problem here. Ubuntu 8.04 Firefox 3.0 b5 on AMD 64 3200+ with 2 gig ram and nvidia 7800GT. Youtube and google videos in small size seem to be okay, but full page flash sites like http://ironmanmovie.marvel.com/ will cause my whole system to slow down. Even the keyboard gets laggy if I have the site open on a tab in Firefox and try to type in another tab. This is a major regression from the flash 9 I had in Ubuntu 7.10.

Mark Miller - [05/26/08 09:11 AM ]
I have pretty much the same specs, Ubuntu 8.04, Firefox 2-3b5, AMD 64 and Intel Core2 duo, intel graphics or nvidia graphics, 4gig of ram, 2 gig of ram...you name it and this flash player is a dog. This seems like a huge deal. Please fix. Will pay in beer.

Ryan Hayle - [06/01/08 01:07 PM ]
The site you mentioned http://ironmanmovie.marvel.com/ is very informative. If you play a movie, it will play the movie in the same size whether in full screen or windowed mode. It plays fine in windowed mode, but in full screen gets choppy/only a few frames per second. Full-screen mode on Linux must use some other way of rendering that is causing this slowdown.

Another example: on hulu.com, play a video, view it in full-screen and see how it gets choppy. Then, click the "pop out" button which opens the video in a new (scalable) window. Put the window in full screen by hitting F11 (in Firefox) or simply maximise the window. The video will now play at a decent speed.

I don't know if this is an NVIDIA driver issue (I'm using a GeForce 8600M GT with nvidia-new 169.12), but I don't experience this on my other (MUCH slower) laptop using an ATI card. I've also tried this using Flash 10.0 b218, 9.0.124 and 9.0.48, all with the same results. I've disabled any compiz/opengl/composite things, tried it with the nv driver, and nothing seems to help. I hope this issue is fixed soon!

Jerone Young - [06/01/08 03:13 PM ]
I have some interesting info for everyone. So lets start.

This issue DOES NOT happen if you have an Intel x3100 or x3500 integrated graphics card. I have a Thinkpad T61 with an x3100 graphics & 2ghz Core 2 Dou card and a Intel BOXDG35EC Motherboard with an x3500 and 3GHZ Core 2 Dou. Both play full screen prefectly. Hulu.com & Adultswim.com play perfectly full screen on my 1920x1200 monitor.

Now had a AMD 4200+ with Nvidia 6600GT system, that could not do full screen for your life. It was the exact issue you guys where seeing it was like a slide show on my 1920x1200 monitor. I was using the proprietary Nvidia driver .. as the open source nv driver was just too slow.

So it appears that Intel integrated graphics cards work fine. While Nvidia & ATI do not. I am using Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). Now the intel drivers are all open source and could have better support for some overlay feature that the others do not (that the flash plugin takes advantage of).

On wikipeidia you can see the intel cards support a lot of motion compensation features as well as codec acceleration features. I'm unsure which flash takes advantage of when you have hardware support enabled:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA

Mark Miller - [06/01/08 05:30 PM ]
My toshiba satalite A105 has integrated Intel, and I see the problem. Not using the proprietary drivers.

Jerone Young - [06/01/08 05:37 PM ]
@Mark Miller
 

Is your intel card a 950 or 945 ? The new features are in the x3100 & x3500 which only come with Intel 965 chipsets. Looking your laptop up on the net I see it would have to be a 950 integrated card which is older with an Intel 945GM chipset.

So it appears something with the x3100 & x3500 intel chips lets flash operate fullscreen fine though.

Mark Miller - [06/01/08 05:53 PM ]
Yes, its the s4344 with the 945GM.

Sebastian Turzanski - [07/09/08 06:24 AM ]
I have the same problem with NVIDIA FX6200 with propietary drivers and OpenSuse 11.0 with 2.6.25.9 kernel

Sebastian Turzanski - [07/09/08 06:27 AM ]
btw the new flash 10,0,0,525 has no improvement in this area

Luke Wheeler - [09/30/08 06:21 AM ]
Hi all,

Just to throw my findings into the mix as this is a pretty unacceptable and Adobe should be helping to provide a resolution to this, even if it means liaising with other hardware / software vendors. Whilst I am not experiencing a full meltdown as some people are - there is definitely an issue here that needs addressing.

I have an Asus U3S laptop (Dual core, 2.2GHz, 1.5GB Ram, Vista) with an Nvidia GeForce 8400M G (128MB VR) graphics card and an onboard Intel graphics card which I can switch between. The Nvidia GeForce stutters when playing 720p flash media in full screen and drops frames. The supposedly less powerful Intel chip plays it perfectly in full screen consistently operating at full frame rate.

I have an old Acer Travelmate running a Celeron CPU and onboard Intel graphics and it plays back perfectly in full screen.

I have tried a mid range Acer Aspire with an Nvidia GeForce 9300M G (256MB VR) and the same full screen playback stutter is there.

I have also got a much higher spec Acer Aspire 8930 (512MB VR) with Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT... and this is "ok" most of the time.

I have yet to find a new-ish ATI or decent onboard Intel accelerator that has these problems.

I have tried latest drivers for all above Nvidia cards and Flash 10 - and no difference.

Based on the other comments in this forum and my own findings I believe the problems lies with Nvidia's mid range cards - or the way that Flash uses these cards for full screen viewing - which Nvidia struggles with where ATI / Intel do not.

I have some additional 720p VP6 Flash video where other forum members can check out the issue: http://www.recastdigital.com/Dev-Player_V04-2BP/ (Check out "Ducati" and look at the smooth or not smooth movement of the bike and the people at the end)

I welcome any feedback on causes or possible solutions. Adobe?

Chris Denley - [09/30/08 12:59 PM ]
Flash 10 beta works as expected. It still occasionally stops working until I close firefox entirely, but I suspect that has more to do with nspluginwrapper, which I need since flash isn't 64-bit.

rodolfo cristovao - [04/19/09 07:25 AM ]
Edwin, please cross check with this one -> http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1805

I first noticed the performance loss was not happening with mozilla, and (incredible) if I have two tabs open in in ie7.
try out ourselves.