On 04/03/2011 09:24 PM Robert Heller wrote:
At Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:41:35 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
For a long time now I've wanted to be able to watch videos. I've done the "try this!" and "try that!" method and it hasn't worked well. So I'm wondering if anyone running CentOS 5.5 has Shockwave on Firefox working.
Currently it works for me with short videos-- up to two or three minutes long. However, when Shockwave is enabled, CPU usage jumps to 99%, sometimes even 100%! If I disable it CPU usage goes down to 1 - 5%. (For those who speak load avg, I've seen highs of 6 and 8... as opposed to the no Shockwave-now of 0.14 to 0.45.)
So with the CPU already buried just by having Shockwave is enabled, if a video lasts longer than four minutes, gaps in the video's continuity begin to appear, and by ten minutes in the video is locked up altogether.
What's everyone else's experience with this? Does anyone have a setup where they can view a 1.5-hour video normally... and maybe even work in their editor alongside it at the same time? If so, would you be open to explaining what hardware and software etc. you've got so that this works so well?
I am able to watch 1/2 hour TV shows with flash-plugin-10.2.152.27-release from Adobe's repo in Firefox (firefox-3.6.13-2.el5.centos), on my i686 IBM ThinkPad X31 laptop (which has 512Meg of memory and a 1700MHz, Pentium M processor), using CentOS 5.5. The CPU does get hot (the fan fires up sometimes). Oh, I use a *very* lightweight X11 setup: I don't use GNome or KDE or any sort of 'Desktop Manager' system at all. Just FVWM in MWM mode. Virtually NO 'eye candy' at all. My system boots to runlevel 3 and I fire up X11 from my login.
I have made no attempt to watch longer videos with flash. I do watch 3-5 minute music videos all the time, but I use mplayer for those (even the FLV files I have downloaded from YouTube).
Robert, you bring up a good point about X. But two things: First, my Dell i600m has the same CPU as your machine, except that mine is a 1500MHz, a tad slower, but I have 2G of RAM and so swap is almost never even touched. Still, since it's my CPU which is getting jammed up by Flash|Shockwave, perhaps measures to ease the load on the CPU generally would be a good strategy.
Secondly, still, as said previously, when Shockwave isn't playing a video (but with gnome and everything else running as usual), my CPU's load avg is trivial, giving me no reason to suspect gnome or anything else I'm running is a hog worth trimming. All indications point to Shockwave itself as being the problem.
NB: While writing this, yum-updated just gave me flash-plugin-10.2.153.1-0.1.el5.rf.i386.rpm. So I've upgraded from flash-plugin-10.2.153.1-release.src.rpm... hopefully it's the fix I need.
Robert, thanks for the response.