Very choppy Flash during fullscreen mode

Question

When I try to play Flash videos in full screen, sometimes - but not all the time, which makes this bug so aggravating! - the video gets very, VERY choppy, and UI controls do not really respond at all. Sound works fine. Disabling Compiz does nothing to alleviate the problem (switching to Ubuntu Classic (No Effects) - I even created a new user just to test this out to make sure it wasn't a local configuration problem).

This problem exists both in the latest beta build of Chrome and the most up-to-date Firefox with latest Flash. No problems when I watch a video in full-screen, it seems to be just Flash.. and videos tend to play just fine when not in full-screen mode.

I'm on a Thinkpad W510 with an nVidia Quadro FX 880M graphics card.

If anyone could be help this would be much appreciated.

Solution 1

Install Flash-Aid and run the extension wizard. It will detect installed flash plugins, remove them and install the best option according to your system architecture and version. Additionally, it will apply some tweaks that should improve performance and fix those common issues.

If you experience black video on full screen after that on YouTube, then run the Wizard again and install Flash Beta or disable the option to "Override GPU validation".

Solution 2

NOTE: This is the workaround for youtube. Still, same prinicple should work on any flash-based content.

If none of suggestions worked and if your videos play well in any resolution i.e. 480,720,1080 when flash content is not maximized and lag/stuttering/choppiness occurs only in full screen mode, try this: try right-clicking the video and select pop out video. Then, just press F11 and the video should be still playing well with no lag.

This works for me and I'm using dell dual-core t220 2.0 Ghz, 2GB ram with ati radeon HD 3200 video card and using the ati official proprietary driver 12.1. Long story short, if You are using proprietary ati drivers and lag occurs only in full screen, try poping out the window and maximize it instead pressing the full screen button on the flash player instead. Also, turning of Vblank in ccsm also helps for overall performance.

Comments

[Jose Silva]

Sorry for a, ehm, xkcd moment, but here: xkcd.com/619

[red]

Flash seems to work really erraticly for me anyhow, sometimes fullscreen is black and you need to ESC -> retry a few times to get the video to show up. Wish it would die already.

[lovinglinux]

Just updated Flash-Aid to get the new Flash 11 Betas, for both 32bit and 64bit. If you already use Flash-Aid, all you need is to execute the Wizard to install. Hardware acceleration and the performance tweak "Override GPU validation" is working on YouTube again. No more black screen. If you already use Flash-Aid, you probably will receive an alert tomorrow, since it only checks for updates once a day. But if you run the Wizard today, you can ignore that alert.