[jaunty] Choppy video playback and high CPU usage when watching online video

[ericjosepi]

Basically when I playback ANY video (not just YouTube/Vimeo HD) using Adobe's Flash Player with Mozilla Firefox, my video playback is incredibly choppy to the point of unwatchable.

This is a pretty major bug and if anyone has any information that I should be providing, let me know and I will post it.

Version: 10.0.22.87ubuntu1

eric@PwnBox-Alpha:~$ uname -a
Linux PwnBox-Alpha 2.6.28-11-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 20 19:40:40 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

System is up to date as of 10:00 AM March 23, 2009 MDT.

[gonzo1984 (marcelgort)]

I'm getting the same problem using jaunty with the same version of flashplugin-nonfree.
My CPU usage jumps to 100% when a play a video using flash in firefox (not fullscreen).

[Jonatan Schroeder (jonatanschroeder)]

Seems like the problem is not only with flash. I noticed this problem with flash videos (including online radios that only display the disk cover), mplayer, totem, xine and with voip like skype. There are people having problems with all kinds of environments and drivers: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1146319. I think this is not a problem with flash itself, but something higher, like pulseaudio or X.

[Givrix (geoffrey-mosini)]

I'm confirming the trouble is with adobe's flash plugin.
Firefox's window where any flash element is active like video or sound but not banners.
Firefox doesn't crash and the window can still be properly closed.
Same problem under opera but as they are wrapping the plugin it's okay by closing the tab.

I've recently disabled pulseaudio trying to fix glitchy sound so it may be the cause.

[Givrix (geoffrey-mosini)]

Sorry for posting twice but effectively, everything is solved by installing pulseaudio back.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

It is not a flash bug since reinstalling pulseaudio fixed it.

[Per Heldal (heldal)]

To me it looks like video and audio keeps having sync issues with any player when pulseaudio is involved (totem, mplayer, mythtv, flashplugin, vlc, ffplay).

The results are better for players that use gstreamer with pulse disabled (kill daemon and disable autospawn). Ditto for mplayer with direct ALSA output. Sending sound through jackd also works fine for players that support it.

It looks like this is a problem which has been introduced somewhere between pulseaudio 0.9.10 (intrepid) and 0.9.14 (jaunty). At some point I tried 0.9.14 with intrepid, but reverted to 0.9.10 because of this problem. I've tried pulseaudio 0.9.15 with both intrepid and jaunty, and that makes the problem even worse. A kernel with CONFIG_HZ_1000=y as recommended by pulse developers show some improvement, but doesn't completely solve the problem.

Debugging with mythtv (svn trunk) indicate that audio latency varies a lot (40-200ms) when pulseaudio 0.9.14/15 is used, but remains fairly constant (~40ms) with pulseaudio 0.9.10. Could this be the cause? These numbers are from a E6600 system with an ASUS Xonar DX soundcard (snd_virtuoso). Numbers differ slightly with other soundcards, but the symptoms are the same.

[RomanIvanov (ivanov-jr)]

The same problem, reproduced only for slow PC (1GHz, 700Mb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce4), MySystem Xubuntu 9.04.
On my quick PC(CoreDuo 2.2, 2Gb, NVIDIA) - works fine.

[Steven Mitnick (stevenmitnick)]

I'm having a similar problem. I have an Asus EEE 1000 and thought that it was the hardware but once I saw similar videos on an Acer Aspire One with XP run smoothly, I decided that this was a software issue. A video I compared it with between the two OSs was http://www.thegreatflu.com/. On Ubuntu Asus eee 1000 it ran choppy and on the Acer with XP it ran smoothly.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release the Karmic Koala. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.