(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hey folks,

I've been having playback issues with Flash in Lupu 528 in Firefox. The machine is older, but I've read of other people with similar hardware specs (or even somewhat less hardware specs) having no issues with Flash so I am wondering what is different on my machine that could be preventing it from working properly?

The specs are: 1.6ghz Pentium 4 single-core, 768mbs RAM, 128mb Sapphire Radeon 9600XT with 512mb of Swap.

Playback is very skippy while loading videos, but if I even let them buffer to completion, they are still very laggy. I'm not home right now so I'm not sure what version of Flash is installed (although I know I got it from the Repos), but I know I've got the latest version of Firefox installed on it (16.0.2 I think?) It's odd because the skipping is random...at times it will seem to play almost perfectly, and at other times, it will skip with no frame changes for seconds and seconds on end. I always hear the audio perfectly though. I even set videos on Youtube to their lowest quality which seems to make no difference.

Am I just being overly optimistic about my hardware? To be clear, I'm not expecting it to run videos in 720p or anything, just the usual 320 or 480 options you often find. I know it's an older machine, but I would think on a light OS like Puppy that flash would run decently (excluding the fact that Adobe's Linux support is terrible).

Is there anything I can try to have flash work more smoothly? I usually only have JUST Firefox open when trying to watch videos, so it's not that any other program is taking up the resources. The only other "program" I have open at all times is Pwidgets with a clock, RAM and CPU monitor, calendar and weather. I've also gone through and removed a lot of packages I don't use and disabled many startup items I don't use as well.

Thanks for any suggestions!

You are below the bottom range for flash minimum recommended processor speed for Linux. Even my processor which is twice your speed is not real good, but is watchable.

duke

Purely by coincidence http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 501#664501

In the second post there's a link to another thread, might help you.

Just for informational purposes....
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplay ... specs.html


System requirements

Linux

2.33GHz or faster x86-compatible processor, or Intel Atom 1.6GHz or faster processor for netbooks
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 5.6 or later (32 bit and 64 bit), openSUSE® 11.3 or later (32 bit and 64 bit), or Ubuntu 10.04 or later (32 bit and 64 bit)
Mozilla Firefox 4.0 or Google Chrome
512MB of RAM; 128MB of graphics memory

Note: Flash Player 11.2 is the last supported Flash Player version for Linux. Adobe will continue to provide security updates.

One thing you can try, if possible, is to open a Flash video (like a YouTube video) full-screen, then call up the Flash properties by right-clicking on the video and selecting the option, then uncheck the option for hardware acceleration.

Also, the Low Quality Flash extension will attempt to force all Flash to render in 'low quality,' which may also help.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I'll have to try them....I figured I would at least be able to play them in a watchable manner somehow (even if it did have to be on minimum quality), but I guess my chances are pretty slim on that system.

It sucks about Adobe's Linux support and the fact they favor Windows more...my brother has a desktop that's not much higher in spec than the system I mentioned processor-wise and he can watch Flash videos fine in WinXP...

(Not saying I like Windows or Linux any more than each other - I appreciate both )

Would video drivers have something to do with it? I'm just using whichever ones Lucid loaded by default for that video card. Should I install some from the repos and see if that makes a difference?

What is your connection speed to internet?

Could be video driver issue. Not sure what driver you are using.
Try this:
Run Quickpet (located on desktop)
Go to driver tab
Select click here to test your graphics card
Install the recommended driver.
If you get driver from here or the driver tab of Quickpet, it should guide you with the install. Very important to follow all directions.

If at any step you have problems. Tell what you where doing and what you see. That way we know where you are in process.

Try this also:
Install this program
Getflash
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=74491
(make sure to download the newest version)
After installing Getflash.
Run from menu->Internet->Getflash install flash player
This program will find the latest version of Flash Player and install

darkstrike wrote:I've been having playback issues with Flash in Lupu 528 in Firefox. The machine is older, but I've read of other people with similar hardware specs (or even somewhat less hardware specs) having no issues with Flash so I am wondering what is different on my machine that could be preventing it from working properly?

The specs are: 1.6ghz Pentium 4 single-core, 768mbs RAM, 128mb Sapphire Radeon 9600XT with 512mb of Swap.

One way around this is to PAUSE the player, then go into the /tmp directory, find the cached .flv file there and open it with mplayer. It plays perfectly smoothly for me with gnome-mplayer (and I'm using a vintage 560MHz PIII).

The only drawback is that the audio gets out of sync* with the video. Doesn't matter for most youtube clips, but I'm sure it would for movies (I don't watch movies, so it doesn't worry me.)

*anyone have suggestions to get around this? I recall that gxine had a pulldown menu that allowed me to sync them, but mplayer doesn't

Thanks Shep!

I'll have to look into it...now that you mention that idea - wasn't there a standalone program or some such in Puppy designed to paste links into to download Youtube videos?

darkstrike wrote:Thanks Shep!

I'll have to look into it...now that you mention that idea - wasn't there a standalone program or some such in Puppy designed to paste links into to download Youtube videos?

I just use the Firefox addon Downloadhelper. You can save the video out to a disk location, and direct the tab to a low-load location (such as your default homepage).

Open your save location and play the video (and then you have it saved if you want to view it again).

darkstrike wrote:Thanks Shep!

I'll have to look into it...now that you mention that idea - wasn't there a standalone program or some such in Puppy designed to paste links into to download Youtube videos?

You may be thinking of Internet > You2Pup
That app is in Dpup Exprimo, and was good while it worked, but it stopped working for me about 2 months ago. I can't explain why—maybe there were changes made at youtube to thwart software downloaders?

The technique I described is quite easy, and if it's a clip that you wish to keep, while you are in /tmp just rename the .flv file so it relocates to a permanent directory on your HDD.

darkstrike wrote:

wasn't there a standalone program or some such in Puppy designed to paste links into to download Youtube videos?

Here's something even better.
(Always use the latest version; YouTube tends to juggle things around and render the older ones obsolete.)

Thanks Dewbie! I'll install that later tonight when I get a chance!

That works great Dewbie!

Now to find one that lets me use videos from another site.....I tend to watch a lot of videos on Streetfire (think of it as a car-oriented Youtube) as well and would love to be able to see videos from there in this manner too!

darkstrike wrote:That works great Dewbie!

Now to find one that lets me use videos from another site.....I tend to watch a lot of videos on Streetfire (think of it as a car-oriented Youtube) as well and would love to be able to see videos from there in this manner too!

I use Firefox "or Seamonkey" Video Download Helper:
(not the same as Video Downloader).

Has long list of sites other than Youtube that also work;
including :Streetfire.

Hmmm - I'd used Download Helper before a long time ago on my windows machine, but I uninstalled it due to pop-up ads or something....this was like 2 years ago though, so maybe I will have to look back into it...?

There's a number of similar extensions for Firefox; personally, I've always used UnPlug. Run a search on addons.mozilla.org and try all of the extensions, see what works best for everything you're looking to do.