flashplayer-nonfree and multiple cores
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From: Tony Houghton on 7 Dec 2009 08:38 How well does flashplayer-nonfree (64-bit) utilise multiple cores when playing video esp BBC iPlayer? It does seem to be making use of both my cores, but it's difficult to see from the graphs whether it's exploiting both of them to the max. It's utterly pathetic that it's too slow to manage fullscreen on a Core2Duo (does it have a software scaler running in the interpreter or what?), but my family would benefit from my hand-me-downs if I upgraded too, so it's tempting. Gnash seems to have gone from working but unable to access the buttons to not working at all on iPlayer or youtube :-(. -- TH * http://www.realh.co.uk
From: Geoffrey Clements on 7 Dec 2009 11:17 "Tony Houghton" <h(a)realh.co.uk> wrote in message news:slrnhhq1a2.adb.h(a)realh.co.uk... > How well does flashplayer-nonfree (64-bit) utilise multiple cores when > playing video esp BBC iPlayer? It does seem to be making use of both my > cores, but it's difficult to see from the graphs whether it's exploiting > both of them to the max. It's utterly pathetic that it's too slow to > manage fullscreen on a Core2Duo (does it have a software scaler running > in the interpreter or what?), but my family would benefit from my > hand-me-downs if I upgraded too, so it's tempting. Gnash seems to have > gone from working but unable to access the buttons to not working at all > on iPlayer or youtube :-(. > It's too slow full screen on my four core AMD Phenom! -- Geoff
From: Tony Houghton on 7 Dec 2009 12:16 In <slrnhhq425.4bj.pm(a)nowster.eternal-september.org>, Paul Martin <pm(a)nowster.org.uk> wrote: > In article <slrnhhq1a2.adb.h(a)realh.co.uk>, > Tony Houghton wrote: >> How well does flashplayer-nonfree (64-bit) utilise multiple cores when >> playing video esp BBC iPlayer? > > Grab the video using get_iplayer then use mplayer to watch it. Yes, I can do that I suppose, or use totem (which can also do youtube I think), but it would be nice to have the convenience of having it work in the browser. Are the streams that get_iplayer fetches comparable in quality to the high quality versions in the web plugin? -- TH * http://www.realh.co.uk
From: Andy Leighton on 7 Dec 2009 12:54 On Mon, 7 Dec 2009 17:16:55 +0000 (UTC), Tony Houghton <h(a)realh.co.uk> wrote: > In <slrnhhq425.4bj.pm(a)nowster.eternal-september.org>, > Paul Martin <pm(a)nowster.org.uk> wrote: > >> In article <slrnhhq1a2.adb.h(a)realh.co.uk>, >> Tony Houghton wrote: >>> How well does flashplayer-nonfree (64-bit) utilise multiple cores when >>> playing video esp BBC iPlayer? >> >> Grab the video using get_iplayer then use mplayer to watch it. > > Yes, I can do that I suppose, or use totem (which can also do youtube I > think), but it would be nice to have the convenience of having it work > in the browser. Are the streams that get_iplayer fetches comparable in > quality to the high quality versions in the web plugin? They can be. You have to choose to use mode=flashhd for those programmes where a HD version exists, or mode=flashvhigh1 for normal. If you don't specify you get smaller and lower quality files. -- Andy Leighton => andyl(a)azaal.plus.com "The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials" - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
From: Dave Farrance on 8 Dec 2009 16:25
Tony Houghton <h(a)realh.co.uk> wrote: >How well does flashplayer-nonfree (64-bit) utilise multiple cores... I think that the answer is: not too well. I have a Revo R3610 nettop with a puny Atom N330 1.6 GHz CPU (but which *is* dual-core) and if I set my YouTube account to always play "High Quality" (which gives a maximum of "HQ35": FLV, H.264, 5.99Mb/s, 640x368) then it plays it just fine, but if I click the red "HD" button and select 720p ("HQ22": MPEG4, H.264 14.6Mb/s, 1280x720 29.97fps) then no chance. However, I've tried the Flashplayer 10.1 beta and that's *much* better. But it's 32-bit only at the moment and will not run on 64-bit Linux. http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html I've got Mandriva Linux 2010.0 i586 installed on my R3610, and with Flash 10.1, I can now play Youtube 720p high-def almost OK. The following clip is a hard test of 720p, with lots of detailed movement at 1280x720 resolution, and it plays with a stutter for the first second or so, and then plays smoothly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quwebVjAEJA&fmt=22 However, I've got the KDE4 desktop's load viewer applet running, and I can see that all four of the Atom 330's virtual CPU cores are running at about 90%, so I'm fairly sure that the Linux version of the 10.1 beta Flashplayer isn't using the promised nVidia GPU acceleration (despite the VDPAU library being installed) but that it *is* due to a marked improvement of Flashplayer's ability to average the load across the CPU cores. However, I've reverted back to Flashplayer 10.0 for the moment because 10.1 still crashes sometimes, and it mishandles scrolling of the web page in which the video is embedded, leaving contrails down the screen. -- Dave Farrance |