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My system has an atom N270 + intel i915 graphic card.

Under Windows I can enjoy 720p bigbuckbunny youtube video fullscreen without any trouble.

Under Ubuntu 12.04 I have laggy and choppy fullscreen video and choppy video when not fullscreen.

I've seen that under ubuntu the cpu is almost always at 100% use.

What I must do in order to have videos playing well under ubuntu ?

I've already tried the following :

Force flash gpu detection : (no result) :

  • mkdir /etc/adobe
  • echo "OverrideGPUValidation = 1" | sudo tee -a /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

grub options (had results but not enough) :

  • i915_enable_rc6=1
  • i915_enable_fbc=1
  • i915_lvds_downclock=1
  • pcie_aspm=force

updated intel drivers (glasen ppa)

Using chrome instead of firefox (had impact but not enough)

Antoine Rodriguez
  • 6,496

1 Answers1

5

Flash under linux does not support hardware acceleration. So instead of your graphics accelerator your CPU has to do all the audio/video decoding, which makes playback laggy. You have several options here. You could

  • Enable HTML5 playback and see if that fixes the issue for you (works on youtube and a couple of other sites).

    Not all youtube videos currently support HTML5 playback. To bypass this limitation you can install Youtube Center, an open-source extension that's compatible with Chrome, Firefox and other popular web browsers.

    Aside from making HTML5 playback available across the board, Youtube Center also comes with a lot of other features that can greatly enhance your youtube experience.

  • Play the video with VLC (open up vlc, hit CTRL + V to paste your video link and hit enter)
  • Use a dedicated youtube client such as minitube
  • Install ViewTube, a userscript that allows you to play flash videos on sites like youtube, dailymotion, blip, etc. in a video player of your choice

These are workarounds rather than definitive solutions. But until Adobe decide to fully support Linux again there is nothing else, I fear.

Glutanimate
  • 21,393
  • would be nice to know if and when they will fix it. I have the feeling it used to be less worse with older versions of flash and firefox, could this be the case? If so one could think of rolling back a few versions. – Andrea Borga Apr 06 '14 at 21:13
  • @AndreaBorga Yes, I think Adobe Flash on Linux supported hardware acceleration for a while. As far as I recall it was restricted to Nvidia hardware (via the VDPAU interface). I would advise against installing an obsolete version of flash to get this working again as it poses a major risk to your security. Adobe Flash is one of the main vectors for malware. – Glutanimate Apr 06 '14 at 22:09
  • @AndreaBorga There's also this webupd8 article I had saved a few months back. Wasn't very stable for me when I tried it out (flash player would frequently crash). But you could give it a try if you have an Intel card. – Glutanimate Apr 06 '14 at 22:15