Flash Video -- help!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 12:31:26PM -0800, William Park wrote:
> To those who are watching Flash Video without any problem, I'd appreciate some 
> insights and pointers!
> 
> My problem:
> 
>         Flash Video is slightly choppy at full screen.  My monitor is 1600x1200, 
> so I guess the  full screen video is 1600x900.
> 
> What I have:
> 
>         - Athlon II X2 260 (dual-core, 3.2GHz, 2MB)
>         - nVidia GeForce 8500
>         - Firefox 4 (beta)
>         - Adobe Flash Player 64-bit "square" preview version
>         - kernel 2.6.37 (x86_64, SMP, preemptive)
> 
> What I want:
> 
>         Smooth Flash Video at full screen.
> 
> What should I do?

Get hardware accaleration for video playback in flash.  Adobe claims to be
working on adding vdpau support, but who knows if/when that will happen.

>         1. Should I upgrade the video card to GeForce 430 ?  I borrowed GeForce 
> 250, and did see some improvement but not that much.  GeForce 430 is advertised 
> to be better at "multimedia" things.

I highly doubt that matters.

>         2. Should I get a whole new computer?  Eg. i7-870 quad-core which goes 
> up to 3.6GHz, assuming Turbo Boost works.  My current computer is already 3.2GHz 
> dual-core, so I don't think similar i3/i5 will bring a substantial speedup.  
> Then, again, may be they might.  I don't know.

I doubt it.  Adobe flash is simply shit, especially on Linux.

> Any advice will be appreciated.

Well the simplest method is: Run windows, it has hardware accaleration
in flash.  Since that's not what you want, well, there may not be much
you can do.

Now assuming you aren't wasting CPU on tons of other crap, I am actually
surprised it can't handle that.  I can run a 24" 1920x1200 screen
externally on my laptop and get smooth flash (as long as I kill firefox
regularly to clean up the crappiness in it), and I only hafve a Core 2
Duo 2ghz in the laptop, and a geforce 105M video chip.  I run the nvidia
binary drivers, but I don't believe flash takes any advantage of that yet.
I don't use full screen flash very often, so maybe it isn't always smooth.
Maybe the higher res videos would be a problem.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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