Choppy Flash Streaming
 

Hey -

I have been having trouble on my Slack 12 box with streaming flash videos on Firefox. The symptoms are that the video is in general choppy. For instance: I will be watching "Chuck" on NBC rewind which is streamed via flash-player, and the video will go fine for a few seconds, stop, then go for a few more seconds, stop, &c. The sound is also choppy. This does not happen on my windows box.

glxgears gives me 260 frames per second, on a built-in graphics card.

Watching videos off my hard-drive work just fine, so it is obviously a problem with streaming.

Thanks!

260 fps is really slow (I get over 2000 FPS using my integrated video card) -- what is the output of
I think you need to enable direct rendering (if you get an output of "direct rendering: No" then it's a dri problem). I don't have instructions to enable offhand -- it involves editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Search this forum for information.

What brand is your integrated graphics card?

There is probably something else at work here as well since audio is also choppy, but this could be a start. Some people get better internet connectivity after disabling ipv6.

# glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes

As for my graphics card info, kinfocenter under OpenGL > Direct Rendering > 3D Accelerator gives:

Intel Corporation
82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device
Subvendor: Dell
Revision: 01

It would be could it really be graphics card if video off my hard drive works?

Thank you!

Compared to windows, flash has always seemed to perform worse on linux for me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

How fast is your CPU? I believe CPU speed effects flash performance moreso then your video card does.

My CPU is an Intel Pentium 4. It has plenty of throughput!

I think that it has something to do with the way that streaming is done with large files, since when I stream short videos off of u-tube, it works fine. I have only noticed the choppy-ness when I am streaming large files.

It rather sounds like your network connection just isn't fast enough for some reason.

Doubt it's the internet conenction as he's got another box that works fine. It's possibly some funky NBC thing, I've noticed some flash sites perform much better then others (youtube is one that has always performed well for me).

What does your /etc/X11/xorg.conf setup look like? 200 fps is really low on glxgears.

Whoa... 200 fps at the default resolution of glxgears? Yeah, that's definitely a sign the video driver is in flames.

One should be able to get 200 fps out of an old VLB Cirrus Logic card.

Here is my xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/share/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/OTF"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "record"
Load "xtrap"
Load "dbe"
Load "dri"
Load "glx"
Load "extmod"
Load "GLcore"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc101"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
#DisplaySize 330 240 # mm
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "MAG"
ModelName "7770"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
### [arg]: arg optional
#Option "NoAccel" # [<bool>]
#Option "SWcursor" # [<bool>]
#Option "ColorKey" # <i>
#Option "CacheLines" # <i>
#Option "Dac6Bit" # [<bool>]
#Option "DRI" # [<bool>]
#Option "NoDDC" # [<bool>]
#Option "ShowCache" # [<bool>]
#Option "XvMCSurfaces" # <i>
#Option "PageFlip" # [<bool>]
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
VendorName "Intel Corporation"
BoardName "82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

I have never configured my built in graphics card aside from: xorgsetup

I have blazing fast T1 internet, so it probably is a problem with my graphics card, if you guys think that 200 fps is slow. Any ideas on how to fix it?

The newest Flash release (9.0r115) from last December has pretty severe performance issues. See the Adobe Linux blog for more info. You might try 9.0r48 - if you can find it - to see if that helps.

Although I'm not familiar with using an intel card, your xorg.conf looks fine to me.

Try the version of flash speck recommends - you can get it here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/view...4266&sliceId=1 - and see if that makes a difference

Hey everyone.

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

The adobe 'Penguin.swf' blog is really the key. This forum wont let me post the URL because this is my first post. But you can Google it easily enough.

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.

:D

The strange thing is the developer of the Linux Flash plugin is also an ffmpeg developer. mplayer/ffplay uses about 1/10th the resources of the Adobe Flash plugin (on Linux at least), so you have to wonder why one is so efficient while the other is a sloth.

Thanks creepytennis---I'm glad to know that the problem was in proprietary SW. Viva la revolucion! -rm_dash_rf_star