[RANT]Flash video playback

sahilm · 2010-03-21 11:59:24

Full screen flash video playback is much smoother in my virtualized Windows XP(qemu-kvm) compared to my native Arch setup(Radeon 4350, open ati drivers). This is flipping crazy. Why Adobe, why!?

Cdh · 2010-03-21 12:15:11

I don't understand why they just don't use mplayer to play videos. Would solve so many problems.

DanGray · 2010-03-21 14:33:27

It's pretty much universally accepted that this is Adobe's fault for not putting enough of an effort into Flash for Linux. I with that agree to a large extent - for a start they need to enable hardware acceleration as a top priority. I am running an Nvidia ION on an Atom 330 with x64; now, this thing should be able to play fullscreen SD video regardless, hardware acceleration or not - yet fullscreen flash still kills it, which is a real disappointment and the only think that sometimes makes me wish I had taken the windows 7 option (and I've been using Arch for over 6 years!)

That said, I don't think it is fair to put all the blame in Adobes court. The writers of flash video players have to do some answering too. For example, here in the UK the BBC iplayer plays fine in full screen for me - nice and smooth, while the Channel 4 player is unwatchable. Likewise for lots of flash video on the Internet, some are good and some are bad - all Adobes fault? I think not (although I'll give then 80% of the blame).

Here's is a great hack as a workaround though... Ignore conventional wisdom, enable composite extensions and install compiz-complete. Once you have it up and running enable the 'Zoom Desktop' plugin. Now you can draw a window around your in-browser video and Compiz will magically zoom it to full screen, and it will remain completely smooth (this is sort of a hardware acceleration hack I suppose!).

The down side is that you cannot interact with the player while it is zoomed in, but it removes the problem of slow video completely.

Score!

Dan.

Last edited by DanGray (2010-03-21 14:35:42)

Gusar · 2010-03-21 19:32:31

Cdh wrote:

I don't understand why they just don't use mplayer to play videos. Would solve so many problems.

Because MPlayer can't overlay complex graphics on top of the video. Like the funky caption bubbles the youtube player does. Or when a youtube video is over, the picture shrinks and on the bottom you get thumbnails of other similar videos. You can't do that stuff with MPlayer. For flash to do this, it has to do colorspace conversion and scaling in software - that's where the slowness comes from - while MPlayer uses the Xv extension to do colorspace conversion and scaling in hardware. The solution to this is using VDPAU, which gives you video decoding and hooks to blend the video with other graphics, all in hardware. But that only gets you people who use nvidia's proprietary blob. Then there's VAAPI, but that one is for now only supported by Poulsbo and some select few ATI cards. And of course, to get all this into flash it needs more commitment from Adobe than having only one guy working on flash for linux.

GogglesGuy · 2010-03-21 20:01:02

Gusar wrote:

Cdh wrote:
I don't understand why they just don't use mplayer to play videos. Would solve so many problems.
Because MPlayer can't overlay complex graphics on top of the video. Like the funky caption bubbles the youtube player does. Or when a youtube video is over, the picture shrinks and on the bottom you get thumbnails of other similar videos. You can't do that stuff with MPlayer. For flash to do this, it has to do colorspace conversion and scaling in software - that's where the slowness comes from - while MPlayer uses the Xv extension to do colorspace conversion and scaling in hardware. The solution to this is using VDPAU, which gives you video decoding and hooks to blend the video with other graphics, all in hardware. But that only gets you people who use nvidia's proprietary blob. Then there's VAAPI, but that one is for now only supported by Poulsbo and some select few ATI cards. And of course, to get all this into flash it needs more commitment from Adobe than having only one guy working on flash for linux.

Well, from my point of view I don't need all the crappy overlay buttons and graphics... just give me the damn video

Cdh · 2010-03-21 21:49:26

The html5 version of youtube does not have all that stuff too.

I tried vaapi today with hd 4650 + catalyst-test. It's really cool playing 1080p @ 10-15% cpu.

While googling for vaapi I found many results that talk about gnash supporting vaapi. That sounds not bad.

flash needs to be made open source and then replaced by gnash.

Gusar · 2010-03-22 03:20:16

Cdh wrote:

While googling for vaapi I found many results that talk about gnash supporting vaapi. That sounds not bad.

Yep, I've seen mentions of that too. But what I'd like to know is if this is actually works on real live webpages out there, preferably more than just youtube.

skottish · 2010-03-22 03:33:12

DanGray wrote:

It's pretty much universally accepted that this is Adobe's fault for not putting enough of an effort into Flash for Linux.
... snip ...

No doubt. Adobe has "afforded" the world one primary developer for Linux (http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/). This developer is extremely talented and has brought so much to the Linux community, but a little help would be in order. The following is a good read that's broad on multimedia and brushes over this:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

sahilm · 2010-03-22 08:42:29

skottish wrote:

DanGray wrote:
It's pretty much universally accepted that this is Adobe's fault for not putting enough of an effort into Flash for Linux.
... snip ...
No doubt. Adobe has "afforded" the world one primary developer for Linux (http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/). This developer is extremely talented and has brought so much to the Linux community, but a little help would be in order. The following is a good read that's broad on multimedia and brushes over this:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

Quoting from the developer's blog

the key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data.

This seems to be the problem.

Gusar · 2010-03-22 11:34:35

sahilm wrote:

Quoting from the developer's blog
the key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data.
This seems to be the problem.

It's wrong though, because VDPAU and VAAPI *do* have hooks for this. Go through the comments, you will find answers from Stephen Warren (Nvidia employee, responsible for VDPAU) and Gwenole Beauchesne (VAAPI dude).

.:B:. · 2010-03-22 11:43:40

Cdh wrote:

flash needs to be made open source and then replaced by gnash.

Flash just needs to be abandoned altogether. What's with people calling for open sourcing crappy closed source solutions? :-/

Cdh · 2010-03-22 15:42:13

.:B:. wrote:

Cdh wrote:
flash needs to be made open source and then replaced by gnash.
Flash just needs to be abandoned altogether. What's with people calling for open sourcing crappy closed source solutions? :-/

Because we want open source alternatives to fully support anything the proprietary thing did. But better.

mrunion · 2010-03-23 00:57:07

Flash should die. Please, let it die!

Arch Linux

#1 2010-03-21 11:59:24

[RANT]Flash video playback

#2 2010-03-21 12:15:11

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#3 2010-03-21 14:33:27

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#4 2010-03-21 19:32:31

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#5 2010-03-21 20:01:02

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#6 2010-03-21 21:49:26

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#7 2010-03-22 03:20:16

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#8 2010-03-22 03:33:12

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#9 2010-03-22 08:42:29

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#10 2010-03-22 11:34:35

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#11 2010-03-22 11:43:40

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#12 2010-03-22 15:42:13

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

#13 2010-03-23 00:57:07

Re: [RANT]Flash video playback

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