Choppy flash player movies

[Lawmate]

Hi
I'm not sure when it started exactly but it's got too bad to ignore now. When watching embedded flash movies in Firefox they play out really stuttery and choppy. The audio is fine but the videos isn't smooth at all.
I have Win 7 64-bit on a 2.53 dual core with 4Gb RAM so I don't think it's a hardware issue. I've made sure I have the latest updates of Firefox, Flash add-on for firefox, Direct X.
I've also tried uninstalling the IDE device driver and re-installing it as suggested by one forum. I've also tried unchecking the 'use hardware acceleration' option in the flash settings.
I found a blog that gave instructions for using a greasemonkey script to play flash content using VLC player. When I play any media files with VLC, it seems to work OK so I thought this would be good, but I couldn't get it to work and it only works for youtube videos, not Vimeo ones.
When I look at the system performance, when a flash video is playing the processor use is at about 70% and the process called 'plugin-container' which is for Firefox uses about 70Mb of memory. When I close the tab with the flash movie content, the processor use drops to between 0% and 10% and the plugin-container uses about 10Mb of memory.
Is there some setting I can change to just allow the movies to play smoothly. Youtube videos are just about bearable but Vimeo ones are pretty much unwatchable.
Any help appreciated
Thanks

 

[richc46]

It could be what is know as buffering. The only possible solution that I know is, when it happens stop the video and give it a chance to catch up. When you restart it should work fine.

 

[Lawmate]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that. I'm pretty sure that it's not buffering as it happens whether the FLV file is still loading or if it has fully loaded.

 

[roncerr]

Sorry if this thought is way off, but I think Flash only works in 32-bit browsers. Have you tried IE8 32-bit?

 

[Gornot]

This choppiness you experience in Firefox is because of the browser itself, not your hardware. I bet that the stuttering happens on a regular interval; every 10 seconds. This happens because of the session managing that Firefox has built in. So, here's what you can try:

Open Firefox and type into the address bar: about.config
The browser will probably annoy you with a message, ignore it and click Yes or whatever.
Now hit CTRL+F and type into the search: browser.sessionstore.interval and change the value to a higher number. If you are not paranoid about saving your tabs in case the browser crashes (as Firefox obviously is) you can set it to, like, 300000 (milliseconds), which is 5 minutes, or even higher, with a simple math calculation.

 

[snahonaznam]

Right Click on the video ---> Adobe Flash Settings ---> Disable Hardware Acceleration

DONE!

 

[Gornot]

Disabling hardware acceleration will, in fact, not help much, if not at all. This is NOT the "big new feature" that came with v10.1, this option was available in Flash for(ever) a long time.

The only thing you'll get from disabling this option are choppier visuals, i.e. look carefully at, for example, the YouTube player while in fullscreen, the font will become fuzzy, as well as the video itself.

Unless something was changed recently, I haven't used that "disable" option in quite a while.

 

[Lawmate]

Thanks for the replies. As I said before, I already tried checking and unchecking the hardware acceleration and there didn't seem to be any difference.
Sopolias, I tried the sessionstore interval trick but to no avail. The videos are constantly choppy, as I said before, esprecially Vimeo ones.
I'll give the IE 32bit idea a go. It's a bit annoying though because I prefer Firefox but if it means I can watch smooth videos then I guess it's worth it.
Cheers

 

[Gornot]

Try to monitor Firefox's usage on CPU and RAM while you watch videos.
From your system specs I cannot see much, but are you perhaps trying to watch HD videos, without actually having full support from your CPU to view such high quality content?

 

[Lawmate]

Hi Sopolias
When I'm watching videos the CPU is sometimes as high as 60% usage, coming from Firefox and firefox plugin manager. There aren't other programs that are using this processing power as well because when I close the tab that contains the video, the CPU usage drops right down to 1% or 2%.
How could I configure my CPU for video playback as you said?
I heard somewhere that possibly the flash player isn't set up to be used with 64 bit operating systems. Maybe that could be the cause?
Anyway thanks for the replies
Laurence

 

[Layback Bear]

When watching a video go to the lower right corner and see if you get a video setting. Some videos will have it and some won't. If it does go to a higher number.

 

[mitchell65]

I have only just read this thread and I wonder why no one has suggested you check your internet speed. Try this and post us the result:
Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test

 

[whs]

In my experience, FireFox is nothing but trouble. Why don't you just use the good old IE - works perfectly for me.

 

[roncerr]

I have only just read this thread and I wonder why no one has suggested you check your internet speed. Try this and post us the result:
Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test

I'd tend to agree except that in post #3, he said it was choppy even after waiting for the file to download.

 

[Lawmate]

Thanks for the replies. I have tried adjusting the quality level in the bottom right hand corner an although it does make a slight difference when it is not in HD, it certainly doesn't stop the choppyness.
I don't think it is my connection speed as I normally download things between 500kb/s and 1mb/s and it doesn't make a difference to the playback whether the video has fully loaded or is still loading.
Also I've tried Internet explorer and Google Chrome and the choppyness happens in all of them.
cheers

 

[mitchell65]

Thanks for the replies. I have tried adjusting the quality level in the bottom right hand corner an although it does make a slight difference when it is not in HD, it certainly doesn't stop the choppyness.
I don't think it is my connection speed as I normally download things between 500kb/s and 1mb/s and it doesn't make a difference to the playback whether the video has fully loaded or is still loading.
Also I've tried Internet explorer and Google Chrome and the choppyness happens in all of them.
cheers

Just to check, do a speed test. It only takes a few minutes and you might just be surprised by the result. Where are you in Cornwall and are you on a main exchange or one of the many satellite exchanges we have here? How far away from the exchange are you. I ask these questions as I led one of the campaigns to get broadband into Cornwall many years ago and I still have access to the individual exchange data.

 

[roncerr]

750 kilobits/sec is slow but 750 KiloBytes/sec is 8 times faster and should be ok. In any case, if you wait for the download to finish before playing back it won't make any difference if the speed slows down to 0.

 

[mitchell65]

750 kilobits/sec is slow but 750 KiloBytes/sec is 8 times faster and should be ok. In any case, if you wait for the download to finish before playing back it won't make any difference if the speed slows down to 0.

Absolutely true but often when the progress bar indicates completion, it is not quite there an needs quite a few more seconds to omplete. At least when we see the result of the test we will know the actual speed. At the moment we just know what "normally" happens. There might hav been a change in the perfomance of the ADSL signal. It happens all the time down in the far south west of the UK!

 

[Lawmate]

Hi
I did the test and got 1.95Mb/s download speed. I normally download much faster than an eighth of that though. Anyway as roncerr said, I'm pretty sure it's not a connection issue because I normally wait for the video to be fully loaded before playing it. Also the audio plays smoothly, whereas if it was running out of buffer the audio normally skips.
I live in Falmouth by the way. I imagine it has a pretty fast connection because of the uni here but I expect you know for sure. Anyway thanks a lot for the suggestions
Laurence

 

[roncerr]

...I did the test and got 1.95Mb/s download speed...

My speed is only about 1.5Mb/s on that test since I'm using a telco line. (Cable is generally faster.) I usually have to be prepared to let the download get ahead before playing. However, due to my UMPC computers' processor speeds of 1.5 GHz - 1.9 GHz (Intel Atom) HiDef video looks like a slide show. It takes a combination of processor speed, graphics speed, memory, and an efficient OS, usually only available in modern desktop models, to play Hi-Def video Flash.