One of the drawbacks to dropping cable TV was losing summer broadcasts of pro tennis. Recently my wife and daughter pointed out that you could watch some matches online via espn3. So I tried to get it on the media box hooked to the big screen TV.
I've got F12 on the media box running with a 64 bit installation. I installed this box with 64bit flash (v10.0 rc )before the adobe bug forced everyone to Flash 10.1 and Adobe decided to drop 64 bit support for linux (at least for that release). Everything on this setup was working fine until I tried to use ESPN3. That site shows a small window wrapped by all kinds of extra junk in a browser window that is 2/3 the size of the physical display. That small video window is hard to see on the big tv screen. But there is a full screen option. Clicking on that displayed a thin horizontal strip across the display. It appeared I was stuck with watching tennis in a tiny little window.
Fortunately, I'm not the first to try this. There were two problems here. First, my flash plugin was a 10.0 rc release. This thin-strip problem was apparently a problem with that release. Since there is no 10.1 in 64bit I had to remove the 64bit libflashplayer.so installation and install the 32bit according to the instructions in Mauriat Miranda's guide. But that was just the first fix.
The second fix turned out to require disabling hardware acceleration. This setting can be found by right clicking over the flash video to get a menu. Choose the “Settings” option. The main window that opens should show your hardware acceleration setting.
Disabling this has improved our use of flash on this box. Since it's a dual core 2.7GHz AMD 64 Athlon, it's plenty fast to handle the video in full screen though the video is a bit jumpy. I may need to tweak it some more, perhaps going to a lower resolution if possible. But I checked the southpark site and it now plays full screen quite well. We'll see how this configuration performs for us over time.
I’ve tried playing Flash at various resolutions both on high-end dual-core’s and multiple architectures (32/64). It seems as though full screen Flash in Linux is still not ready. Although the last time I tested this was quite some time ago, I doubt much has changed.
ps. I think the South Park is a bad test since it is a relatively low animation. If you try any high speed action video it always seems choppy enough to be frustrating.
Hey Mauriat. While it’s not equivalent to broadband cable quality, we were able to watch the ATP LA finals yesterday with little trouble. There was little ghosting or jumpiness. We actually had more problems with the feed freezing the video while audio continued playing. So it works okay if you’re tolerant of less than perfect quality.
South Park is a low end test. The purpose (in my BeagleBox project) is to show that you can get decent quality with low speed action. It is the low end measure. it certainly is not meaningful to a large swath of what’s available, however. A slightly more realistic test is the Daily Show’s spinning globe opening sequence. That would be medium speed action. Then I’ve got to find some high speed action for high end tests. I’ve currently assumed that the trailers from IMDB.com would suffice for that test. But live action sports may be a better choice.
Anyway, for my home setup, we were happy to get full screen working well enough to watch tennis yesterday. Strangely, live events are still scheduled for online playback. That was something I hadn’t thought about when dropping cable. I just thought I’d watch on demand all the time. It’s all a learning exercise. :-)
Just a quick followup: I’ve found that if I set the CPU Frequency Monitor Preference to go full out all the time (2.7GHz) I can play full screen for web video, Hulu and MythTV playback of videos. There is little skipping or stuttering except for the occasional incoming cable modem hiccups. The quality of the display is fine though I noticed watching the black and white episodes of Lost In Space on Hulu there was some jittering in the black gradients in the background. I think this is due to the quality of the recording, however, as I don’t see things like that when watching, for example, the Daily Show.
Anyway, I’m rather pleased with my walk away from cable TV. I’ve got pretty good entertainment via the network now (and local broadcast TV).