Flash 10.2 On Intel Will Warm Your Lap, But Not Much More

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Flash 10.2 On Intel Will Warm Your Lap, But Not Much More

A few hours ago our Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Linux benchmarks were published that showed off the performance of Adobe's new Flash acceleration method dubbed "Stage Video" that is now in beta. On Linux this Flash Player 10.2 utilizes NVIDIA's VDPAU and Broadcom's Crystal HD APIs for the video acceleration. Some Intel Linux users have claimed though that their video playback experience was better with this proprietary Flash Player, even though their drivers lack VDPAU, so we ran some tests ourselves...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODg2MA

[thefirstm]

At least the Flash Player update can keep your lap warmer this winter, until the browser plug-in crashes.

This is great! lol

[Zhick]

Too bad, I was hoping for 10.2 to be less sucky. As it is right now, even fullscreen SD-resolution flash-videos are barely watchable on my Intel i5 laptop.

[Cyborg16]

Without a 64-bit version, I'm not even going to try it...

[molecule-eye]

This is interesting, because I just installed 10.2 beta and managed to watch a 720p HD youtube video completely smoothly in fullscreen on my Intel Core Solo 1.06Ghz CPU with integrated Intel 945GM graphics chipset on Kubuntu 10.10. HOWEVER, I could only get it do it ONCE! That was after a fresh reboot. After that, flash at that setting plays WORSE than the integrated flash plugin with the Chrome dev build (which is at version 10.1).

So what I want to know is how the heck it played smoothly ONCE? If it can do it once, it must be able to do it AGAIN and ALWAYS. But the fact that it did it once seems to be impossible by what's suggested by this article which makes things even more puzzling.

[Ragas]

Isn't anybody thinking about why it is becoming hotter!?

And "video playback was as choppy as always" is not really a qualified statement. A framerate indicator of any sort would have been nice.

[Adarion]

Hehe, warm your lap. Nice one.

Yeah, but I guess it will be the same with all non-nv chips. Furthermore, 64 bit is probably also not working/existant (though using the nspluginwrapper is nice since it then can't crash your browser) but besides all that I hope to switch to an alternative soon.

[Yfrwlf]

HTML 5 and other real standards which will help replace Adobe Flash FTW!

[DebianAroundParis]

I tested the Harry Potter trailer in 720p you used in your previous test: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ux_vdpau&num=1

It played perfectly, as did the other youtube 720p video I tried yesterday. With the previous version of Flash, 720p videos were horribly choppy, totally impossible to watch. CPU usage with this Harry Potter video: 40%

Here: Core2Duo, G33 Intel IGP, Kernel 2.6.36, Mesa 7.9, Intel driver 2.13.901-2 (in Debian), xserver-xorg 7.6~2, xserver-xorg-core 1.9.2-1

[vertex2]

It played perfectly, as did the other youtube 720p video I tried yesterday. With the previous version of Flash, 720p videos were horribly choppy, totally impossible to watch. CPU usage with this Harry Potter video: 40%

Then probably this release fixed some bug for you as Flash clearly still uses your CPU for playback.

I noticed VDPAU is an open source api, with a lot of capabilities(more than XvMC or others?). If so it seems a reasonable choice from Adobe to use this. Why won't other video drivers support this, given that its open source?