Flash performace in Firefox

[davexnet]

Hi all, I noticed a little jerkiness watching a video in FF, so I opened up the "system activity" tool and noticed that FF
(plugin-container) was using 40% of my dual-core cpu.  (seems a little high - that's 80% of a single core)

I stopped the video and went to the same page in Konqueror - it plays the video (nsplugin) using 25% of the cpu.

I booted to my dual boot windows XP and FF uses about 20-25 % there.
Any thoughts on this?  Something in FF not configured optimally?
Here''s one of the links where it occurred if you'd like to take a look:

http://www.skysports.com/video/inline/0,26691,12602_6537367,00.html

[parnote]

dave,

My money would be to place the blame on Adobe, for pushing out such substandard fare as the flash plugin for Linux. It's almost as if it's an afterthought.

Not that any of this helps ...

parnote

[davexnet]

parnote, I hear what you're saying and I'm in agreement.  You should look at the Adobe forum for the Flash
player, it's absolutely pathetic.  Shame on Adobe.

Yet, even still, I don't understand why it would use substantially more cpu in FF compared to Konqueror.
Is Konqueror using something else to play these videos ?

EDIT -one other thing I forgot to mention - at the bottom of the video (in the link I provided)
there's a link that takes you to the video directly, brightcove.com, instead of viewing it as a link
in Skysports.  Doing it that way also results in substantially less cpu being used.

Repeating this in Windows, the cpu is similar no matter which link you display the video in FF -
something odd there.

[T6]

i have the same opinion parnote

still, 20% of a big dual core cpu is alot, 600mhz more or less for just play a simple video that in a normal program like vlc or smplayer in fullscreen is absurd!

i have experienced the same problems you describe in windows and linux on different machines but also not sure if firefox does work that well on linux, it is like it works in something similar to a windows emulation mode making it ask more resources that on windows

i'm using opera as a plan b, similar results as what you report with konqueror

supposedly firefox 4 changes things but only time will confirm this

"Yet, even still, I don't understand why it would use substantially more cpu in FF compared to Konqueror.
Is Konqueror using something else to play these videos ?"

afik no, if it calls a flash player to show the video, the problem is not the content itself, it is flash player itself that uses too much for this simple task

[parnote]

I think you've got problems on two fronts ...

First, rumors are rampant that the Flash player code is a mangled mess. And, it's no secret that Adobe puts little to no effort into the Linux version, especially when compared to the versions for the "commercial" operating system.

Second, Mozilla has gotten increasingly sloppy with their code for Firefox. I've had various problems with it ever since Firefox 3.2.

FWIW, I get better flash performance from Chromium browser. But then there's the whole other issue of how much personal data you are willing to give away to Google. Midori also works very well.

parnote

[T6]

isn't chromium the low fat and low google version?

[davexnet]

Even if you accept 40% in Linux and 20% in Windows (at least on my modest box)
I still don't understand why so much CPU is needed to display a small video in a window.

I Understand somewhere buried in the Flash setting you can set HW acceleration.
I'm not sure if I've seen it in PCLOS or even if it works - judging by the high cpu it's not active.

As an experiment, I played a youtube video - the type where a song plays and the background video
is a still image - and the cpu is still high!  What on can be using all those cycles?

Something's rotten in Denmark.