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.

I found a tip to create the file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg, containing the following line: The effect is to force Flash to use 3D acceleration no matter what.

On the 32-bit Flash/Firefox combination I have on my 64-bit multi-lib system (with a Geforce 210), it reduced stutter in Youtube movies! I watched the same movie both with and without it, and the difference was noticeable.

You could, of course, point out that a) I only did one trial and b) I really wanted to see an improvement anyway. Therefore, it would be nice to get some independent verification. Would someone please try this on a pure 64-bit system and then report the results.

More info here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2...fg_file_1.html

I have a pure 64bit Slackware 13 system with socket 939 AMD Athlon64 3200 with a nvidia 8600GT video card. I was not having any problems with flash movies like you have described though. I can move my mouse during a flash video on YouTube and it does not freeze the system or anything.
I tried creating the adobe directory in etc. I then created the mms.cfg file:
and I put OverrideGpuValidation=true in it.
I then restarted Firefox. I don't seem to notice any difference. I was not having problems before with flash though.
Question: How can you confirm that flash is indeed using 3D acceleration after you have created the mms.cfg file? I have checked the box for 3D acceleration in the flash video settings.
For what it's worth, I remember reading about Firefox locking up with flash with the hardware acceleration box checked in flash's settings. Unchecking the 3D acceleration box fixed the problem in these cases.

You have no problems with flash, even in fullscreen and hi-res?

That was Damgar :).

As for how you can tell if Flash is using the GPU: the answer is complex.

I'm actually surprised that I did (seem to) see an improvement, because surely an NVidia card would have been detected properly?

I don't usually watch flash videos in hi-res. Just playing around a bit with the "OverrideGpuValidation=true" option in use, I can watch videos at 720p in full screen without issues. Like this video for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFZ5r...ure=popt01us15
Anything greater than 720p will cause stuttering though. Hi-res greater than 720p will also bring my system to a crawl.

This thread seems as good a place to post this as any (it focused a lot on the merits of 64-bit Flash):

Adobe just released 32-bit Flash 10.1. Did they release 64-bit Flash 10.1 too? No! Instead, they pulled 64-bit Flash for further development.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06...or_linux_dead/
http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/ado...labs-prog.html

If you need Flash, use a 32-bit browser. This would be a good time to join the HTML5 beta on Youtube and use Chrome to surf it too.

I'll have to look into the HTML5 beta. That sounds promising.

It is. I've been using firefox nightly builds since webm was announced and youtube has been working great with it. The performance is similar to flash and if you, like me, need flash only for youtube, you can remove flash completely. Finally. Only drawback for now is that most old videos are not available in webm format yet, but that should be fixed with time.

FYI: I had the same behaviour (64bit flash hang on mouse movement while fullscreen, nvidia proprietary driver) just until yesterday: I built myself a 2.6.34 with con kolivas -ck1 patchset and for the first time (incredible to say, I had lost any hope) it seems to work pretty fine :)

Con says he started developing again on linux kernel because he read this on xkcd :D

The weird thing is, they were developing a beta version of flash 10.1 for 64bit linux. So now that the final release of 32bit flash 10.1 is released, the 64bit flash 10.1 for linux just vanishes!
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flas...r10_64bit.html
Supposedly they are ... But when will that be???

The html5 beta works just fine on the videos that support it.... Which unfortunately don't include my favorites yet. :)

I built the mozilladevelperpreview3.71-webM using the Slackbuild for firefox-3.6.3 and it works, but some of the videos that play fine in google-chrome give an unsupported format error with the developerpreview. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkeLg...eature=related is an example of a video that works in Chrome, but not the mozilla preview.

Firefox cannot display h.264-encoded videos using HTML5 (if it used gstreamer as a backend then it could, but alas I don't see that happening any time soon). Any WebKit browser should be able to display h.264-encoded videos (ie most of the videos on YouTube, unless they include ads in which case it's flash-only) and though I haven't followed the WebM format too closely I'm sure one of the gst-plugins should be able to handle WebM as well. Firefox is out for h.264 and I very much doubt it will *ever* gain support unless there is a paradigm shift in the way it handles HTML5 video. Any WebKit browser though should be 100% compatible (including Chrome, of course, but I use h.264 HTML5 video with uzbl -- one of the most basic WebKit browers available). If you want to use the HTML5 beta with Firefox, you're in for some frustration and it's probably best to just stick with Flash until more of the videos support WebM.

On the bright side, the 32-bit version of Flash 10.1 is perfect. I now have Flash running inside a 32-bit Google Chrome on my 64-bit multilib setup, and I can watch the following video in 720p resolution, full-screen, with perfectly smooth motion and no AV/sync problems. And without my CPU usage hitting the ceiling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAyCTepec4c

Flash 10.1 in Firefox is also running fine on my Slackware 13.1 32bit system. I gues we will just have to wait for a pure 64bit lflash for linux :(

I can't agree with that, but i guess it works at least.
I use firefox as my browser or sometimes seamonkey and konqueror and the problem i have with flash is no sound or messed up sound that hangs with an irritating noise.
Now this is an old bug in flash that never been fixed, but i can restart the browser or go to private browsing (porn mode) and back and it works again.

That's not a problem I can ever remember having.

Hmm... I've just built my own kernel with this patchset. There is a significant fire-up, but on my configuration flash 64-bit still freezes while mooving mouse on full-screened HD movie :( Luckly, I don't watch movies via flash ;)
But as of now, I got virtualbox running smoother :) Thx.

I built the patched kernel the other day........I'm assuming it was the patch that gave me the option of 10000Hz timer, since I don't ever remember seeing that as an option? LOL

I went ahead and used that just to see if it broke my system. I guess an uptime of 3 days says it didn't. Various things like boot time seem a little quicker with the patched kernel.

Heh, I was not so extreme ;) I use 2000Hz only timer... For now, all seems to work perfectly... The notes about this timer clocks stands, that this "overclocking" may be dangerous for some drivers, so this option is not recomended for production use ;) We see in the future, how it works... Maybe with the next kernel I try some higher option ;)

That option has been there for as long as I've been building kernels (over 10 years now). It causes the capacitors in some systems to emit an audible whine.

I would choose CONFIG_NO_HZ for a tickless kernel instead.

Sounded promising. But statements from Youtube today indicate it won't last:

http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/f...html5-tag.html

That's too bad. It works great on the videos that support html5. I should look into how my Iphone does youtube without flash. I haven't been limited on the videos I could watch there.