Video from swfdec-mozilla not rendered properly on armel

[Dave Martin]

Binary package hint: swfdec-mozilla

Specifically, I experience a problem playing video from YouTube; however, I haven't seen video work from any site. I tried both firefox-3.0 and firefox-3.5.

As a consequence, there doesn't seem to be any working flash video support out of the box on armel. (I've never seen gnash work for this, and I don't know of a viable alternative... unless you can suggest something?)

It appears as if the video is being decoded, but nothing is rendered to the browser window. However, if I scroll the browser window so that the video window within the web page is hidden, then scroll back again, the part of the video window which is revealed will be updated with more recent frame content. As soon as any part of the video output window is made visible, the frame content there remains frozen until the video window is scrolled off the screen and revealed again; this applies to the whole framebuffer coming out of swfdec, including the playback position and time indication at the bottom of the frame.

The problem occurs both on a local display (using the fbdev driver MIT-SHM X extension) and over remote X. I don't have access to an armel platform with better driver support than this; I've seen it happen on Babbage boards and also on other Cortex-A8 platforms.

The problem does _not_ appear to happen on i386 (both with a local and remote display). It's possible there's an architecture-specific problem, or a timing issue which is exposed by the relative slowness of armel platforms.

BTW, on all platforms, I see a lot of messages like this appearing on the browser's console output when playing some flash videos:
SWFDEC: ERROR: swfdec_video_decoder_gst.c(156): swfdec_video_decoder_gst_decode: failed to pull decoded buffer. Broken stream?
I don't know if this is relevant— it may just be a geuine problem with the video stream coming from the server.

Version information for where the problem was observed:

$ lsb_release -a; apt-cache policy firefox-3.0 firefox-3.5 swfdec-mozilla
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04
Codename: jaunty
firefox-3.0:
  Installed: 3.0.13+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
  Candidate: 3.0.13+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 3.0.13+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1 0
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty-updates/main Packages
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty-security/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.0.8+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty/main Packages
firefox-3.5:
  Installed: 3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
  Candidate: 3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1 0
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty-updates/universe Packages
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty-security/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty/universe Packages
swfdec-mozilla:
  Installed: 0.8.2-1ubuntu1
  Candidate: 0.8.2-1ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 0.8.2-1ubuntu1 0
        500 http://arm-ports-ubuntu jaunty/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Jani Monoses (jani)]

In swfdec-mozilla now is a transitional package for gnash based plugin.
Youtube works albeit slowly, there are no rendering problems.