confused by flash performance Slackware vs Salix
 

I'm confused by this. I installed SalixOS on my laptop just to play with when I'm bored. My laptop is nothing special, it's a couple of years old
has a pentium dual core t2390 at 1.86Ghz and 3 GB ddr2 RAM with Intel video.

I then have a beast i7 920 clocked to 3331Mhz 6GB RAM, and an NVIDIA GT220. Full screen youtube at 720p is fine unless I move the mouse, then the whole picture freezes. Persistant mouse movement will freeze the screen for a few minutes. This machine runs both slack64 current and slack13 32 bits.

The slack box does much better with 32 bit flash than 64, but it still doesn't do nearly as well as the laptop.

With Salix and Slack being so close to each other supposedly I can't figure out why the hardware seems to be irrelevant. The only thing I can think of would be the video codecs installed by Salix, whereas I built a bunch of codecs myself for Slack.

Any ideas?

You're not comparing the performance between slackware and Salix, you are
comparing the difference between two different graphic hardware installations.

If you want to compare the difference between slackware and salix, you need
to install OS's on the very same hardware and run tests to compare
the differences.

There a few attributes which may explain the behaviour of your
Nvidia installation. Like what device driver are you using to drive the
card, what version is it. Are you on the latest Xorg version.
Does Xorg have the raw display performance options compiled in ?

Some of the suggestions for improving the displaying video at a real time
rate can be found the the mplayer documentation.

I was actually comparing 32 bit flash vs 64 bit flash. After triple boot trials (slack 64/32 bit salix 32 bit) I determined that flash video is, in fact, identical on slack and salix using 32 bit.

Thanks for investigating this. 64-bit Flash's performance on Linux is awful.

Have you tried running 32bit Flash in nspluginwrapper? (I did years ago, but the performance was not good). Or have considered switching to a 32-bit Firefox, which would be possible in a multi-lib setup?

I've got a Ubuntu 64 dual boot on my laptop. Flash is fine (not fine, but as good as it gets with flash ;)) on there as well so I'm assuming there's some multilib magic going on there. It will even do hulu.com which normally just tells you to go away and bother adobe if you are running 64bit linux. Sad as it sounds, for the time being I'd rather just use the opportunity to bash flash and adobe than spend much time on flash since most of my tinker time is spent with Salix right now (I'm trying to get all the things I liked about Ubuntu going in Slack and Salix makes certain things a little easier) so I can get away from Ubuntu.

I have higher hopes for the 10.1 for 64 but I'm an optimist.

Can you describe what you mean by 'flash performance on 64-bit is awful' ?

I run 64-bit on opensuse and the flash apps display video fine.
Are you talking about sluggish display ? Start/stop of video ?

I've had no problems with flash on Slack64.

This Youtube movie runs at half-frame rate if I play it full-screen. That's awful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zuebZI6bKw

Firefox also locks up extremely frequently, and it's usually when I have a band's Myspace page open one one tab and I've switched to another.

For what it's worth "MySpace" is a huge resource hog. I do not experience lockups on my 64bit Slack 13.0 with flash (using the slackbuild for flash from slackbuilds.org for 64bit Slack 13) whenever I land on a myspace page (I try to avoid myspace at all times!!). But I do see my CPU usage jump to very high levels whenever I have the misfortune of finding myself on a myspace page.

For me the problem is in hi-res full screen, like youtube 720p at fullscreen........it plays fine, doesn't kill my system, but if I move the mouse the video hangs, and if I move it for a few seconds the video locks and I can't even ESC out of fullscreen until it decides to sometimes 10 seconds. I get nothing like that on 32 bit flash. And you can forget about hulu.com. Personally my browsers never crash with flash, except for the development 3.6.4 of FF that I'm running on an old Ubuntu install.

And I just confirmed that it works perfectly in 32-bit Flash! I installed a 32-bit Firefox (just the official Slackware package) and a 32-bit Flash. That video now runs completely smoothly, full-screen, at its maximum resolution of 480p.

EDIT: And Damgar, I just watched this movie full-screen at 720p. I even moved the mouse several times. The audio stayed in sync for the entire movie. The only problem was a bit of screen tearing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-Gfkb04DNI

I'm trying now to install 32 bit ff from the slackdvd. I think I've followed the mutltilib directions, but when I try to ru9n the 32 bit ff I get this It seems I need a 32 bit libgconf? I can't figure out where to find the package that contains this.

Try running /etc/rc.d/rc.M again.

I don't have libgconf installed.

Reinstalling my Nvidia driver per the instructions and rebooting solved the problem. I am now able to watch full screen youtube in 720 and move the mouse all I want. Hulu.com works as well. Thank God for AlienBOB! It seems like a long way to go, but that's the beauty of opensource .... there's almost always a way! Thanks for taking an interest. :)

Ahh, that explains it. I **never** run you-tube at full screen.
I have a very very large screen. I bet the upscaling of the video to my
full screen would kill the performance.