last flash release is much slower

[tomeu]

The performance of the latest released flash plugin from Adobe (9.0.115) [1] to watch videos such as [2] is not smooth enough to understand what is said.

But using an older release of the flash plugin such as 9.0.21 from [3] gives a much better playback (good enough in my opinion).

The interesting thing is that when the movie is playing with 115, X is consuming 30% of the cpu. With 21, 2-5% cpu is used by X during playback.

My guess is that for some reason 115 is not using Xv or other feature of the X server so that needs to do more work.

[1] http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-9.0.115.0-release.i386.rpm [2] http://www.francoclic.mec.gov.br/reflets/licao01/introduction.php [3] http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/cern/slc4X/updates/i386/RPMS/flash-plugin-9.0.21.78-beta.i386.rpm

[tomeu]

This thread seems to indicate that the change to worst appeared near 9.0.64:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=616&threadid=1317513&enterthread=y#4778571

[jg]

We need to at least document which version of Adobe flash to use on the restricted formats page.

[tomeu]

Several versions of the plugins along with debug versions (but no debugging symbols) can be found here:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266&sliceId=2

[wad]

I disagree with the above assertion that version 9.0.21.78 beta works well enough. I see only a factor of two or three improvement --- not enough for interactive game play, and not enough to prevent problems with game functionality.

For example, Castle Wars (from www.minijuegos.com) only deals a single card when being played on an XO, whereas on an Intel Mac it always deals a full hand of eight cards.

Similarly, the animation at the beginning of Hulk Control Smashdown (from www.minijuegos.com) is still unwatchable, and the game --- while faster by a factor of two to four than using Flash version 9.0.124.0 --- is still too slow to play.

All tests performed with both build 711 and joyride build 2301. There was no perceivable difference between the two builds.

Changing the frame buffer to 24 bit mode (it runs in 16 bit mode by default) had no effect on the frame rate.

[tomeu]

John, the comment you are replying to is from 9 months ago and refer to playing the video in the url below, not to games:

http://www.francoclic.mec.gov.br/reflets/licao01/introduction.php

The mentioned Flash games remain unplayable and I only see two ways forward:

• work with Adobe in incorporating Geode optimizations in the flash plugin,

• work with Gnash in improving their Flash support and try to get good performance in our hardware.

Also, by using a flash version that uses Xv, we don't need to care about profiling X.

[gregorio]

Hi Wad,

I believe that this is yours now. Good luck :-)

BTW I'm taking 5987 out of the 8.2 release notes until we can show that it really does play "better" than previous releases.

Thanks,

Greg S

[mstone-xmlrpc]

Pushing out to 9.1.0, per edmcnierney's request.