Adobe Flash 11 Beta 2 Is More Stable, Faster On Linux

[curaga]

Counterpoint: fglrx video tearing w/ xvideo and no compositor. That appears in a lot of screenshots here in phoronix.

[RealNC]

You've never read a game review online? They never enabled vsync and so had tearing in the screenshots, well before Vista and the first compositor there.

No, they didn't. They can only take pictures of it or try to recreate it artificially in the screenshots in order to explain to the readers what tearing is.

A screenshot can only capture whatever data is in the video RAM, not what the monitor is displaying at the moment. You cannot capture data that doesn't exist anymore. Tearing occurs exactly because the monitor is still displaying data that isn't there any longer (bottom) together with data that still exists (top). The "line" separating those two results in the tearing effect, and can never, ever, be captured by software running on the machine.

[curaga]

You're saying that a screenshot can capture the tearing effect when not using a compositor? Ha, I want to see that happen.

You've never read a game review online? They never enabled vsync and so had tearing in the screenshots, well before Vista and the first compositor there.

[cbxbiker61]

My two test cases (playing the video mentioned earlier in the thread).

Mesa 7.11 - Gallium - Radeon R600 - M880G [Mobility Radeon HD 4200]
Flash displays: Software video rendering, Software video decoding.
/etc/adobe/mms.cfg: OverrideGPUValidation=true (I don't think this is really doing anything with the opensource driver)

Nvidia 280.13 - Nvidia GT560ti
Flash displays: Software video rendering, Hardware video decoding.
/etc/adobe/mms.cfg: EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

In both cases the video looks good to me. In the case of the notebook with Mesa 7.11, it dropped a few frames (I was doing compiles at the time). I guess I'm happy with the beta.

[RealNC]

Don't think so.

You're saying that a screenshot can capture the tearing effect when not using a compositor? Ha, I want to see that happen.

[AnonymousCoward]

Youtube can sometimes say what is being accelerated

While playing a youtube video press the right mouse button and choose Show video info. This opens a box at the top right and in the box there are video rendering and video decoding fields and in recent versions of flash they will say whether software or hardware rendering it taking place. On certain systems the result will change when you switch between windowed mode and fullscreen (e.g. it may start to be able to use hardware rendering when it could not previously).

[matthew11093]

Doesn't matter.

[bridgman]

That's tearing due to the compositor's framebuffer. In fullscreen, the compositor is suspended, so that can't occur.

Don't think so. Tearing has been around a lot longer than compositors, and it has always had the same cause -- basically scan-in out of sync with scan-out. The compositor just adds one more place where tearing can happen.

Real tearing happens due to the monitor displaying something on it that no longer exists in the framebuffer at all. Therefore, it can't be captured with anything else than a camera pointed at the monitor.

We're saying the same thing there -- part of the displayed frame is from something that is (suddenly) no longer there, while the other part of the frame is from whatever replaced it.

[icek]

Can you test without disabling the unredirect option? This always results in some frame dropping, which is why I never disable it.

Just played the video in Unity 2D which i believe isn't using compositing at all, still no tearing...

[RealNC]

I have "Unredirect fullscreen windows" set to false, so maybe that is the cause. I watched link you posted, still no tearing... and, I know what tearing looks like, I used to use fglrx to play videos

Can you test without disabling the unredirect option? This always results in some frame dropping, which is why I never disable it.