Video playing is slow on 12.04

Question

I started using Ubuntu a very short time ago, and it was working perfectly! I upgraded to 12.04 yesterday, and today I realize that everything is running slow. For example, video streaming online, from sites such as Youtube is not working correctly, audio and video breaks constantly. I have a 64 bit system, with a Intel® Core™2 Duo, 2.10GHz × 2 . I don't know what more to add.

I tried free -m on the terminal, it returned that I had only 524MB free from 3858MB. All that i have running at this point is Mozilla Firefox.

Which line did you look at in the free output? On a system working normally, most of your memory should be used: what's not used by applications is used as disk cache and buffers. See free: output format Is there anything other than video playback that's slow? Is this specific to Flash? — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Apr 29 '12 at 23:21
Do not panic about RAM, see more http://www.linuxatemyram.com/ — Smile.Hunter, Dec 31 '12 at 20:43

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 15 '15 at 13:22

From your brief description of videos playing slowly in Firefox, it's possible that you no longer have a genuine (proprietary) version of the Adobe Flash Player installed.

This is a really easy way to do that:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

This installs Adobe Flash Player along with a bunch of other things that are not open source, but you're likely to benefit from such as non-free codecs for Ubuntu's built-in video players.

If you find an error installing this package, it's possible that you don't have the non-free repositories enabled. You'll want the top four of these checked under Software Sources in your system configuration.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 29 '12 at 23:25

0

In my experience, Firefox sometimes have episodes of.. well, extereme memory consumption - which quite possibly are not caused by some problem in Firefox itself but maybe some rogue javascript or flash movie on some page which you currently have opened.

Restarting Firefox helps in such cases.

You can check memory consumption of individual applications using System Monitor application.

answered Apr 29 '12 at 23:25

Sergey

43,665

Thank you both, restarting solved the issue. I feel pretty dumb now.
But i do think there is something wrong with it, whenever i close my laptops lid to put it in sleep mode it freezes, and i have to restart it. Does that sound like a memory issue?

Thank you both.
– pineapple-na May 10 '12 at 13:44
How much swap space do you have – Dec 31 '12 at 21:10

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

0

I have the same problem and has solved it by switching from ubuntu to lubuntu.

You can find how to switch from Is there an easy way to change Ubuntu flavor during upgrade?

I think the problem is unity player causing the lag.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

Community

1

answered Dec 05 '14 at 14:45

Anonymous

101

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 16 '15 at 07:26

AND there is one more possibility, which I must mention as I've experienced it to many times. It seems most any time Ubuntu is upgraded from a previous version it takes several days, or several reboots, to straighten itself out. You can save yourself a lot of grief if you focus on just shutting it down periodically and not stressing about it.

score -2 · Answer 5 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

-2

I experienced a similar problem. I found the solution in https://askubuntu.com/a/131040/1736.

See the post entitled in "tl;dr"

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Community

1

answered Jun 19 '12 at 05:35

Seth

1

1

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. – Eliah Kagan Jun 19 '12 at 09:01

Video playing is slow on 12.04

5 Answers5