caf4926
Thank you for staying with this performance problem.
You may have to accept becoming part of Labs testing on iPlayer front page, scroll down, lower right. Then it will give you the download option.
Thanks, but if it’s beta software at best, I’m not sure I want to introduce into the equation. Will probably wait for the release.
You should be fine with that. And in any case, even if it was poorer than that at busy times the behavior to expect is the screenplay stops and you get the busy symbol as it caches some more. It should not really cause the problem being described in this thread.
Never had screenplay stops with busy symbol on this problem, so I guess your saying it’s probably not a cache problem.
For now, I am excluding my video driver from this problem since it works well on local video (including DVDs) with small player window upto fullscreen. I wait to be proved wrong.
Before I get into the detail of what I tried today, I can confirm that you were right about the probable irrelevance of PulseAudio here. As you seemed twice reluctant to answer my (silly?) question about your situation with that, I decided to remove every installed package Yast showed for pulseaudio, and ran the iPlayer. It made no difference and after reinstalling all packages the problem remained.
The main differences that may matter between my 10.3 (works flawlessly) and 11.1 (works poorly) with streaming video are:
10.3: KDE 3.5.7; Firefox 2.0.0.19; Flash 9; BBC iPlayer 2.9 (High Quality option works well. Fullscreen is just about adequate)
11.1: KDE 3.5.10; Firefox 3.0.5; Flash 10; BBC iPlayer 2.9
There seems to be at least two components to the problem, described in this thread as jerky and stuttering. Movement within the picture appears too slow, and cutting from one scene to the next is slower than it needs to be, hence the jerky effect observed. Also you can sometimes see the audio lagging behind the lip movement.
As well as the BBC (iplayer), I visited several other media sites including CNN and MSN. These media sites ran well on 11.1, but they had one thing in common - their default picture size (fixed) was significantly smaller than the iPlayer that ran poorly. Indeed, one of the other media sites with a picture size slightly larger than the rest, began to show signs of slight jerkiness. At some point in the past on 11.1, I used a site (can’t recall it) where you could switch the player from default size (larger than the above media sites) to the original video size i.e. much smaller, and that corrected the problem.
A useful feature of the BBC iplayer, allows you to pop-out the player from the firefox window and into its own dedicated window (noticeably smaller). You can then further reduce the picture size by dragging the window’s corner to any smaller size you like. Unless you are already flawless, you should see the performance improve as you decrease the picture size, as I did on 11,1. It also works on my 10.3 config, but its not needed there.
I hate to say it, but it seems that 11.1 (or 11.0?) has returned some users to watching those silly little video pictures on their computers. I don’t think many people now would watch TV if they had to put up with the performance of the small screens of the 1950s.rotfl!
If I had to put money on the cause of this problem, I would put it on the combination of Firefox 3 and Flash 10, including any other plugins involved in the streaming. I couldn’t go any further than that,
