[KM400]Flash is very laggy (standard vga adapter/via unichrome video card)

[kikbguy]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

Flash videos are very laggy, especially in full screen mode. This happens after installing flash 10 plugin for firefox on ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, in addition to kubuntu 9.04 and xubuntu 9.04. I am using a common 5 year old hp pavillion a465w desktop pc with a standard vga adapter and a VIA unichrome video card. Please fix this bug because it is the only thing holding me back from switching from windows to linux. Thanks - Adam

P.S. I have tried disabling hardware acceleration and adjusting the resolution and neither attempt fixed the problem.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: firefox-3.0 3.0.14+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox-3.0
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-15-generic i686

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for reporting this to Ubuntu. Could you please post the results of the following command run in a terminal?

lshw -C video

That will show us which video card you have. You might need a different graphics driver to achieve smooth video.

[kikbguy (tulaneadam21)]

Hey Micah,
Thanks for the prompt reply. The results of running "lshw -C video" in
terminal on my computer are displayed below. It apears to be a S3 Unichrome
video card. I'm not sure where I would download that driver because upon
installing ubuntu there was no hardware driver available in
system-->administration-->hardware drivers.

adam@adam-desktop:~$ lshw -C video
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
  *-display UNCLAIMED
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome]
       vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: 01
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 66MHz
       capabilities: bus_master cap_list
       configuration: latency=32 mingnt=2

[kikbguy (tulaneadam21)]

Update - I downloaded the linux tar.gz2 packaged driver for my s3 unichrome
400 series video card from the manufacturer's website (s3graphics.com) and
installed it (I ran the uncompressed install.sh file in terminal and
restarted my computer as per the instructions on www.s3graphics.com). I
don't think it installed properly because I don't see a difference in flash
performance and my framerate is only 500 fps when it should be 2000
according to the installation instructions. The installation of a tar.gz2
video driver and editing the xorg.conf file is too complicated for a newbie
like me. If there was some sort of binary .deb file for ubuntu online or in
ubuntu's software repositories it would probably be easier to install
properly assuming that this would fix the flash problem, but I have not been
able to find one. - Adam

[Bartosz Kosiorek (gang65)]

I think the flash 10 have got OpenGL acceleration.
Maybe your flash animations is slower, because you haven't got good s3 unichrome drivers.

Please attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We're closing this bug since it is has been some time with no response from the original reporter. However, if the issue still exists please feel free to reopen with the requested information. Also, if you could, please test against the latest development version of Ubuntu, since this confirms the bug is one we may be able to pass upstream for help.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]