UNR 9.04 and slow flash video (YouTube)

I have the D150 version...

YouTube videos were very jerky after a fresh install of UNR 9.04 for me. It seems like the Ubuntu supplied flash player is slow on these little machines. Installing the Adobe supplied player improved things greatly for me... Here's what I did.

I first un-installed the the Ubuntu supplied flash stuff - these three packages need to be removed...

swfdec-mozilla
flashplugin-installer
flashplugin-nonfree

Then go to the Adobe site and download the .dep for Linux and install it. (sudo dpkg -i <package name>.deb).

(This last step may not be necessary) Once the Adobe package is installed, create a directory called "plugins" in $HOME/.mozilla/ and copy /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so there. Obviously, because it's UNIX, pay attention to permissions. You need to make sure you own ~/.mozilla/plugins and it's contents.

Once all that is done, restart Firefox, and check aboutlugins page to make sure it sees libflashplayer.so

Also, in general it's much smarter to stick with the software provided by Ubuntu and thats maintained by the package management system, so do this at your own risk.

HD content from Youtube and sites like Vimeo still sucks. How do those video's run in XP? Is this a hardware limitation or just immature Linux drivers?

 

add enable_mtrr_cleanup mtrr_spare_reg_nr=1 to your defoptions line in grub to fix this.

 

Curiously, I have this problem with Sickboy's kernel but not with the stock 9.04 kernel (although this isn't the UNR version).

Unfortunately, Sarvatt's suggestion made no discernible difference on my computer.

 

Sarvatt's suggestion is also posted in the ubuntu community AAO site. Looking deeper in launchpad, if I read it right, there will be no official fix on this.. It seems that jaunty is really just a maintenance release to 8.10...and.. Karmic is now the focus as this may be in direct collision to the upcoming Windows 7.

just a thought :lol:

 

if you want to tell if it's doing anything outside of just observing, do a cat /proc/mtrr. if it doesn't look like this you need the cleanup or else you'll get bad SD flash performance like you describe.

reg00: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x040000000 ( 1024MB), size= 512MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x05f500000 ( 1525MB), size= 1MB, count=1: uncachable
reg03: base=0x05f600000 ( 1526MB), size= 2MB, count=1: uncachable
reg04: base=0x05f800000 ( 1528MB), size= 8MB, count=1: uncachable
reg05: base=0x060000000 ( 1536MB), size= 256MB, count=1: write-combining

acer's bios has all mtrrs used and none of them for video ram. last I checked sickboy's kernel didn't include mtrr cleanup support so the boot options would have no effect anyway. Here is the stock mtrr setup without cleanup and 1 spare reg enabled for reference.


[ 0.000000] reg 0, base: 4194176KB, range: 128KB, type WP
[ 0.000000] reg 1, base: 4194048KB, range: 128KB, type UC
[ 0.000000] reg 2, base: 0GB, range: 1GB, type WB
[ 0.000000] reg 3, base: 1GB, range: 512MB, type WB
[ 0.000000] reg 4, base: 1528MB, range: 8MB, type UC
[ 0.000000] reg 5, base: 1526MB, range: 2MB, type UC
[ 0.000000] reg 6, base: 1525MB, range: 1MB, type UC
[ 0.000000] reg 7, base: 0GB, range: 128KB, type UC
[ 0.000000] WARNING: BIOS bug: VAR MTRR 7 contains strange UC entry under 1M, check with your system vendor!

you'd really need more info on your setup to know why it does or doesn't give slowdowns, exa/uxa/kms or not/tiling enabled or not/driver versions for instance.. If you want the very latest drivers available there is always this PPA that I post them to. EXA/XAA were removed from more recent drivers and UXA has stablized a crazy amount compared to ubuntu's stock ones.

https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa


BTW- HD youtube videos are pretty much unplayable even on XP, you're looking at the limitations on our slow cpus there

 

@sarvatt

can you explain in more detail for a relative noob where and how I must modify Grub to remove video choppiness?

This is my result from a cat /proc/mtrr in terminal so I know I've got an issue per your instructions. Thanks for the clarification.

reg00: base=0x0fffe0000 ( 4095MB), size= 128KB, count=1: write-protect
reg01: base=0x0fffc0000 ( 4095MB), size= 128KB, count=1: uncachable
reg02: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg03: base=0x040000000 ( 1024MB), size= 512MB, count=1: write-back
reg04: base=0x05f800000 ( 1528MB), size= 8MB, count=1: uncachable
reg05: base=0x05f600000 ( 1526MB), size= 2MB, count=1: uncachable
reg06: base=0x05f500000 ( 1525MB), size= 1MB, count=1: uncachable
reg07: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 128KB, count=1: uncachable

 

are you installed

Code:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

 

I have installed those packages yes.

Same results more or or less on cat /proc/mtrr

 

im guessing I would add the above mentioned line into the menu.lst file located at /boot/grub...is that correct?

If so where exactly do I add it? My hunch said somewhere around here:

## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
## alternatives
## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
# defoptions=quiet splash

Thanks for any clarification!

 

# defoptions=quiet splash enable_mtrr_cleanup mtrr_spare_reg_nr=1

 

Thanks Sarvatt!