Adobe Flash Player 10.1 To Support VDPAU?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Adobe Flash Player 10.1 To Support VDPAU?

Adobe announced this week from their worldwide developer conference that Flash Player 10.1 would receive GPU-acceleration for video playback on netbooks and mobile devices when using a NVIDIA GeForce, ION, or Tegra graphics processor. This move is to allow SD and HD video content to be played through Flash on low-end, low-power hardware devices that are powered by NVIDIA GPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzU5OA

[oyvind]

I hope VDPAU isn't the only new thing in the Linux version of FlashPlayer 10.1. A proper "non-lab" x86-64-release and general performance improvements comes to mind. As long as the performance stays at the current level on Linux, I will continue to consider it crap and a major nuisance on web pages. Nothing I hate more than a web page that consists entirely of one or more big Flash-objects (makes me leave instantly).

I couldn't care less if it Now Plays Big Shiny HD-movies (iff you have nvidia), I still have to use Flashblock to control how much CPU the browser burns on rendering ordinary Flash stuff. And it's way too much on even modern multicore-machines.

The only positive thing I have to say about the latest Linux FlashPlayer-release is that at least it doesn't crash the browser (your results may vary).

.

[sp82]

I think that the worst piece of software of my fedora 11 linux boxes is the flash player plugin.
The browser (Firefox in my case) is the major used application, 4-8 hour/day and 250-300 day/year is a running application.
Flash Crash so frequently.
I think that firefox use one single instance of flash plugin for all the tabs of the browser, in fact when the plugin crash, crash in all the tabs.
This is a good news because if multiple instance of the plugin was used multiple core of your cpu was infected with this piece of inglorious software!
In some case, es. when reading the news, the flash plugin is the major case of waste of power (and the lost of battery life of the notebooks) because one core of my cpu is under heavy load with stupid animations and annoying advice banners. The flash plugin generate noise. Yes this is true, the fan of the computers must spin much faster and this generate noise and stress.
The video decoding acceleration is the last problem, the plugin need much more 2D acceleration, less flickering, more integration with the browser and Video Resizing Acceleration for fullscreen playback.
Sorry for my bad english.

[thefirstm]

I really hope that they implement some form of V-sync in the flash player. Tearing drives me completely nuts, and there currently is not any way to play YouTube (and the like) videos on Linux without tearing.

[Apopas]

...Tearing drives me completely nuts, and there currently is not any way to play YouTube (and the like) videos on Linux without tearing.
I have not such an experience.

[thefirstm]

I have not such an experience.

Good for you. Are you using 32-bit with OpenGL acceleration?

[Apopas]

Good for you. Are you using 32-bit with OpenGL acceleration?
I use the 64 bit version with OpenGL acceleration.

[thefirstm]

How did you manage to pull that off? I have been trying and trying.

[Apopas]

I dunno, I just never had that problem. Well with the previous version of flash 10+something, I experienced many crashes and I had to use the 32 bit version of Firefox. Now with flash-10.0.32.18 I get zero crashes as well and totally uninstalled the 32 bit version. I have not tearing and my sister keeps playing every day these annoying flash games in facebook. I don't assume they run as fast as in Windows but the are fairly stable and in youtube I play tearing free even the HQ videos.
I have Nvidia 8500GT and Compiz on but without it's "indirect rendering" option enabled.

[thefirstm]

It is probably because you are using Compiz. I wish I could use compiz, but it causes display tearing in all applications.

[Dragoran]

I use the 64 bit version with OpenGL acceleration.

No you don't, unless you got the source from adobe and added opengl support to it which I doubt.

[Apopas]

It is probably because you are using Compiz. I wish I could use compiz, but it causes display tearing in all applications.
Yes when I use compiz with indirect rendering enabled, it causes tearing everywere. But if I disable this option it works perfectly. Also, even without compiz, youtube videos play fine.
This is my xorg.conf in case you find it useful:
Section "Device"
Option "CoolBits" "1"
Identifier "Device[0]"
BusID "PCI:2:0:0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVidia"
BoardName "GeForce 8500GT"
Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen[0]"
Device "Device[0]"
Monitor "Monitor[0]"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "0"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

[Apopas]

No you don't, unless you got the source from adobe and added opengl support to it which I doubt.

It's obvious that I mean 3D acceleration in my desktop. I could for example use nv driver, but I use the nvidia one. If something is easy to comprehend then is idiot to explain it.

[Rowin]

Just remember that until Flash video performance improves, while browsing most flash video sites like YouTube you can simply run:

vlc /tmp/Flash* # or use mplayer or totem or whatever video player

... to view the current streaming video in a real video player instead of using the browser plugin. It helps if the site allows you to mute the volume of the embedded flash player.

This usually looks better than even with the flash plugin on Windows, since the other players typically have been post-processing to soften compression artifacts, has better vertical sync, allows aspect ratio adjustments, etc.

[djack]

Looks like the Linux version of 10.1 does NOT support video hardware assistance :(

In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate adding the feature to Linux and Mac OS in future releases.

That's in the Release Notes (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf) in a section about NVidia ION - where you would think that VDPAU would be emminently suitable.

[val-gaav]

Adobe flash player is another crap that forces gtk+ file dialogs on me...

Aside from other issues I'm sure nothing of those will get fixed anytime soon ...

[Kano]

Shockwave Flash 10.1 d51

is the biggest crap you can test currently. Youtube crashes Iceweasel 3 (lenny) really without problems.

[bassmadrigal]

I haven't actually tested either of these yet. I found out about them while at work (stuck using Internet Explorer and youtube is blocked anyway). But the requirement for these are Firefox 3.5+ (I think, but it might be fine with 3.0) and the greasemonkey extension. But these will use the default system player to play the youtube files (it will use the mp4's if they are available) to completely bypass flash player.

Youtube without Flash (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771) – This will allow you to stop using the flash based player and use your default player in the browser for mp4’s. In Slackware I think the default is gxine, but you can set it up with mplayerplug-in.

Youtube Perfect (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/38074) – So this has a ton of different options, and includes the one above. One of the cooler ones is it darkens out the rest of the screen while watching something… kinda like Hulu’s night mode.

I really should test this out, but I have shied away from youtube for quite a while due to my low powered laptop and the resource hungry flashplayer. But I since got my desktop back up and have been using that.