Still getting only 2-3fps when watching in HD

[silverhaze06]

After the patch here fixed the choppy playback for most users, https://bugs.launchpad.net/netflix-desktop/+bug/1083858 I am still not seeing any improvement with playback.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

I noticed with the message you posted to the other bug that there was a "GL_INVALID_VALUE" error message. Could you re-run and post that information here and see if that message repeats throughout the problem? I suspect that this may be a graphics driver issue.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

here it is, with every single line included.I finally said screw it, and installed windows 7 back on my computer to see how it works on windows. and netflix plays perfectly with windows. only thing im noticing with this app is that 30 rock, and parks and recreation consistently play at about 15fps most of the time, and everything else so far at the usual 2-3fps.

[rrbrand (slbrando)]

I have one system that shows this slow frame rate, the others are flawless. The debug log above is almost identical to mine, the difference being load of the mesa 3d drivers. When I boot to windows. I also get flawless playback.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

@silverhaze06, is it right to say from that log that you're using the Catalyst 9.0.2 driver? That's pretty old, could you try upgrading your graphics driver?

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

No thats the 2D driver version. My version of catylist is 12.4. I actually updated it before I came here the first time. It didnt improve anything at all.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Hmm, does this sound at all like the issue you have?:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29194

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Oh, and do you know if there's a command-line program I can run to get the Catalyst driver version? (I would like to add it to the script)

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

and here is another debug log after watching a few minutes or 30 rock in HD, which is still playing at about 15fps.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

as far as a command line program you can run, i have no idea on that one. all i know is what it says in the information tab in the program.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

and no, that other bug doesnt sound like what I have at all. other than the choppy video on netflix, everything else works fine. and the test streaming site is still working flawlessly.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Hmm, well - I'm noticing this particular line (shared with that bug):
err:d3d:context_create wglSwapIntervalEXT failed to set swap interval 0 for context 0x2016f8, last error 0x591

I'm wondering if that's making it not swap the display fast enough.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

it could. but i would have no idea. i dont know jack when it comes to code and programming.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

fixme:d3d:wined3d_swapchain_present Ignoring flags 0x80000000.
fixme:msg:pack_message WM_NCPAINT hdc packing not supported yet
err:d3d:context_create wglSwapIntervalEXT failed to set swap interval 0 for context 0x803bff0, last error 0x591
fixme:d3d:wined3d_swapchain_present Ignoring flags 0x80000000.

could it also possibly be the second line there? while googleing it, this is what i found out, "The WM_NCPAINT message is sent to a window when its frame must be painted." seems plausable to me.

or maybe this one? "fixme:d3d:wined3d_buffer_preload Too many declaration changes or converting dynamic buffer, stopping converting"

[rrbrand (slbrando)]

I ran the debug log on the system I have that is showing this problem. This is a few seconds of a movie that's showing the stuttering

Intel Core2 Quad @2.33GHz
G43 (x4500) graphics
4GB memory

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

@rrbrand, hmm - you're not seeing the same error messages... Well, I'll have to look into something else as the source of this issue.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Does this only happen with HD video? Does changing the quality level work around this problem?

[rrbrand (slbrando)]

I see the problem much worse w/ HD video. SD shows closer to normal, but far from smooth.

[omriasta (omriasta)]

My video is also still pretty choppy. Funny thing though is I finally installed the moonlight plugin for chrome and went to the smoothstreaming website. I only get 2-5fps in chrome with moonlight while I get 15-20fps in your wine build with firefox and silverlight.
I also have the ATI drivers for my AMD Fusion e-350. Might be an issue with bad ATI drivers. I guess my next bet will be to test the open source drivers and check performance.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

The open source x.org drivers are even worse for me. When I enable those I get audio, but no picture whatsoever. Just a black screen. Im pretty sure it's something with the amd driver tho. When I watch netflix on windows and enable processor overclocking with the windows version of catylist, i'll get un-synced video and audio, then the playback speed will double.

[bb (mrweinreis)]

I may or may not be affected by this bug.

I have a laptop - core 2 duo 2.2ghz, 1gb ram, 12.04, onboard video

Videos are still choppy but better than they were before your "Choppy Bug Fix." At first I thought maybe my cpus couldn't handle the load, but when I look at htop my cpus never go above about 75% when watching The Crow. It's pretty choppy and the frame rate is about 15-18. This is not HD. In HD the frame rate is about 10-12.
The odd thing is when I watch The Office the frame rate is about 20-24 and much smoother. It's still a bit choppy but not too bad. The cpus never go above about 40%.

Does that sound like a hardware issue, driver issue, or the same issue as other people are having in this thread?

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

Sounds like the same issue im having, but not quite as bad as it is for me. I also noticed that any NBC shows I watch play at a higher frame rate than most stuff on there. But still to choppy to watch.

[bb (mrweinreis)]

Silverhaze - That makes sense since The Office is a NBC show.

You have an ATI card right? It looks like everyone on here has an ATI card except me. I have some onboard video. It might be Intel GMA, but I would have to check when I get home. I'm guessing that most people that aren't having issues have a Nvidia card.

I do have a desktop computer with a Nvidia card and similar specs to the laptop that I'm having issues with. (The hardware is actually worse.) So I will try that when I get home and see what the results are. That may help to pinpoint if it's a non Nvidia video card/driver issue.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

Could be. After trying a bunch of other stuff, and having it not work, im thinking its the drivers as well.

[bb (mrweinreis)]

Silverhaze - What is your cpu load like?

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

Cups isnt on my computer, but the "plugin-containe" process spikes up to 208% cpu load, and averages between 160-180%. Overall cpu load on all 4 individual cores doesn't ever top 85%, same with overall cpu load combined.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

I am having the same problem. When I boot into Windows XP, Netflix works fine, even in HD. Using netflix-desktop, playback isn't anywhere near smooth, and CPU usage is very high. I have a 2.2GHz Core2Duo laptop with 3 GB of memory and an NVIDIA 8400M chipset.

I'm guessing that Wine just isn't using the hardware's acceleration capabilities correctly. Considering how complicated the software stack is with Wine trying to do everything Windows would do, I guess I shouldn't expect perfection. It's basically unwatchable though, so I'll have to keep booting into Windows. Maybe someday it will be usable.

In case it helps, here is a log.

[Nilabja Roy (nilabjar)]

I am seeing similar behavior. Things have greatly improved after the previous "frames" bug fix by Erich. The test site at iis works nicely with 24 fps and download speed 2750.

But Netflix is still having issues. I got some better result by running "gnome classic (no effects)" That seemed to work without HD. Turning on HD still causes frame jumps.

When I boot into Windows 7 things are real smooth. As Adam mentioned we should not expect perfection Wine. And this itself has come a long way.

I also see the 'plugin-container' at the top of top.

My system is ubuntu 12.10 (32 bit) running on a Intel Core dual core chip with 3 GB ram. The graphics card is Intel.

The main thing to note is that if there are scenes with lots of action (like moving cameras, people moving/fighting/running), there are skipped frames otherwise things are smooth.

Thanks a lot on the outstanding work on this

[kirk (iowabeakster)]

I've got the same problem on my Desktop. (2 fps estimated in HD) More fps without HD, but still quite choppy.
 I would be happy to run any sort of test, or provide more details if it would be of assistance.

OS:
Xubuntu 12.04 - 64 bit

Hardware:
Dell optiplex GX 620
Intel Pentium D dual core 2.8ghz
4 gigs RAM, 3.4 usable
Evga GeForce GT 430, PCI express

Video Driver:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.19, manually installed

Side note...
My wifes laptop (intel i5), using the iGPU runs perfectly. And it even runs with the Unity desktop. (ATI driver for her ASUS not working so can't use the dGPU)

[kirk (iowabeakster)]

To continue with my comment above...

pulseaudio -k

Running the command will kill it, but it immediately starts back up again, in effect I can't kill it. Might that be the problem that some of us are having?

[bb (mrweinreis)]

Has anyone tried using a distro that isn't Ubuntu?

[bb (mrweinreis)]

I removed pulse audio (sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio) and rebooted. That did help my frame rate increase. I went from about 16-24 fps to about 20-24. That was in SD. It also sped up playback in VMWare.

[bb (mrweinreis)]

Would hard drive speed possibly make any difference? Perhaps trying a solid state drive?

[bb (mrweinreis)]

I never followed up to one of my previous posts in regards to whether or not this is ATI specific or not.

I purchased some new hardware (Processor, Motherboard, and RAM) hoping that may fix the problem.

Mythbuntu 12.04
AMD Quad Core 4 4100 fx 3.6ghz
4GB DDR
Nvidia 8400GS
Nvidia 310.14
250GB SATA 5200 RPM Hard Drive

Performance is still pretty bad. It's not any better than when I had a Pentium Dual Core 1.8Ghz with 1GB Ram.
I'm getting a high frame drop rate. Panning only gives around 12fps average. This is done in SD with a buffer rate of 1750. When I lower the bitrate all the way down to 250-280 (I can't remember the exact number) I get pretty much the same performance. HD is awful. I get around 10fps.

I've also noticed another person in this thread with a Nvidia card. So this isn't specific to ATI or non Nvidia cards.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

I know when im on the windows side of my computer and use catylist to overclock the cpu, it will play at 2X speed and have laggy audio. when i turn it off it will play fine.

[bb (mrweinreis)]

I did some more testing last night. I ran the diagnostics menu while watching videos (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D). I was very surprised to find out that I was wrong about frame dropping.

In my last couple of posts I was guessing my issue was frame dropping. I was also guessing the frame rate that Netflix-Desktop was playing. It turns out frame dropping is not the issue. On the tests that I ran there were very few frames dropped. While watching a video for 300 seconds I dropped about 150 frames. That's means there's an average of dropping about 0.5 frames a second. That really isn't enough to notice any issues with video playback. It also wouldn't really cause choppiness. The issue must be something else. There is choppiness, but it appears that it isn't frame dropping.

Has anyone else ran the diagnostics (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D) for an extended period of time while watching a video? I'd be curious to see if other people actually are having issues with frame dropping of if their issue is caused by something else, which mine appears to be. Make sure if you run the diagnostics that you go back into fullscreen mode.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Now that I finally have a Redbox trial account I can (maybe) reproduce this problem. I don't see 2-3 fps (I see much more), but I'm hoping that whatever is causing Redbox to drop some frames is the same thing that's causing these severe issues for some Netflix users. I'm extremely busy at the moment, so I don't know when I'll get to this, but I'll let you guys know what I find out as soon as I can.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Ok, I've been at FOSDEM over the weekend and talking to people a little bit in the X devroom they indicated that trying to fix this is a waste of time. They were pretty confident that whatever is causing the problem is a driver bug (since many people do not see the problem). So, I would suggest that people try out different driver versions for their hardware to see if they can find a version that works.

[silverhaze06 (ston3templepil0t)]

You sure the people you talked to were really confident? Or did they just say that without looking into it for more than 5 minutes because they didnt feel like trying to figure it out?

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

They were pretty confident that since it works with new nVidia cards with new nVidia drivers that any problems that occur are with buggy drivers. It seems that nVidia is the gold standard in Linux graphics drivers, though they don't always do a good job of supporting older cards. However, after trying to debug the problem that's cropped up with LOVEFiLM I might have found a performance indicator that's not reading back properly - that _might_ influence the framerate, but I'll have to look into it after fixing LOVEFiLM.

[Chris Modjeska (kurisui)]

I'm getting this too.
i7 950 @ 4GHz
24GB RAM
GTX 670 with latest drivers
SSD

Definitely is dropped frames for me.

[Gustavo Frederico (gcsfred)]

Unfortunately I couldn't get around the very low FPS in Ubuntu. Because of that I had to abandon Ubuntu and install Windows. My hardware: Zotac Zbox Plus, nVidia 500 series, 2 Gb RAM. I got the correct nVidia driver for Ubuntu. Netflix works very well on Windows 7 with the same hardware. I'm sorry to see you go, Ubuntu. Netflix is very important for our family.

[Salamandarias (salamanderrake)]

On Gentoo AMD64 and I am still getting the low fps with movies.

'''
Processor Information:
    Vendor: AuthenticAMD
    CPU Family: 0x15
    CPU Model: 0x2
    CPU Stepping: 0x0
    CPU Type: 0x0
    Speed: 4013 Mhz
    8 logical processors
    8 physical processors
    HyperThreading: Unsupported
    FCMOV: Supported
    SSE2: Supported
    SSE3: Supported
    SSSE3: Supported
    SSE4a: Supported
    SSE41: Supported
    SSE42: Supported

Network Information:
    Network Speed:

Operating System Version:
    "Gentoo Base System release 2.2" (64 bit)
    Kernel Name: Linux
    Kernel Version: 3.10.4-gentoo
    X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
    X Server Release: 11304000
    X Window Manager: KWin
    Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime-release-i386_2013-08-13

Video Card:
    Driver: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce 9800 GT/PCIe/SSE2

    Driver Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 325.15
    OpenGL Version: 3.3
    Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
    Monitor Refresh Rate: 59 Hz
    VendorID: 0x10de
    DeviceID: 0x614
    Number of Monitors: 1
    Number of Video Cards Not Detected
    Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1200
    Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1200
    Primary Display Size: 21.50" x 13.86" (25.55" diag)
                                            54.6cm x 35.2cm (64.9cm diag)
    Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
    Primary VRAM: 1024 MB
    Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x 16x

Sound card:
    Audio device:

Memory:
    RAM: 15961 Mb

Miscellaneous:
    UI Language: English
    LANG: en_US.UTF-8
    Microphone: Not set
    Total Hard Disk Space Available: 894921 Mb
    Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 283898 Mb

Installed software:

Recent Failure Reports:

'''

[Salamandarias (salamanderrake)]

Forgot to mention I am useing 32bit wine 1.7.0

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Are people still having problems with this with the most recent releases? (particularly when using Silverlight 5.1)

[Erik Hj (erikhj)]

Hi

I'm having problems. My setup:

Asus AT5IONT-I DELUXE, Atom D525 @ 1,8 GHz
4 GiB RAM
Mythbuntu 12.04 (Myth running smooth in HD)
Nvidia 304.88 driver (also tested with later drivers from xorg-edgers, no change in symptoms)
netflix-desktop 0.8.5
Silverlight 5.1.20513.0

I get aroung 15 fps at http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming
(Can I somehow measure fps in netflix?)

In netflix video is a bit choppy and alot of tearing. Sound is ok.
HD is unwatchable, probably very low fps. Sound is stuttering.

I get errors/fixmes from netflix-desktop, see attached log.

[rrbrand (slbrando)]

I'm in the same boat as erikhj.

15-18 frames per sec.

Kubuntu 12.04 w/ the latest Intel 2.20.15 drivers

netflix video is a bit choppy. Sound is ok.