Flash Tests

[Carlos Nazareno]

Hi guys! I'm a volunteer for OLPC Philippines and I'm very new here.

Our project, OLPC XO as a Flash gaming/educational gaming platform
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Flash_Gamedev) got approved and we
just received 3 XO units Monday last week for testing and development.

Anyway:

1) I recommend Flash 10 RC over Flash 9 because:
- Flash 10 final should be coming out in a couple of months or so.
Adobe just announced the launch of the CS4 product line Tue. last week
(including Flash CS4). I guess that means they'll be shipping within 2
months or so, so expect Flash player 10 to be finalized by then.
- Flash 9 has no V4L2 hardware support. The XO comes with a V4L2 webcam.
Flash apps that use the webcam show nothing in Flash 9 (cam LED will
light up, but only a black box appears in Flash). In Flash 10, it
shows red & green static but the static reacts if you wave your hand
in front of the camera. I reported the cam behavior to Adobe, and
they're looking into it.
(tested in update.1 711 -> will test in 766 if cam behavior improves).

Anyway, my point is, we should really make Flash 10 our baseline
rather than Flash 9, because it'll be coming out of RC soon.

Btw, youtube played in Flash 9.0.124.0, but maybe that was because I
was using Opera 9.52 in 711...

2) Gnash behavior: testing the pre-bundled Gnash 8.3 in the Sept.19
Livecd build (ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080919.iso)
emulated in Virtualbox showed a lot of sound glitches with Flash 7 & 8
apps, and no sound at all in Youtube. I'm downloading RC 766 now, and
will install it in one of the XOs in a while and report back.
Currently, I only have update.1 711 stable installed in the XO units.

Regarding Flash performance:

I noticed that Flash runs faster in Opera 9.52 (latest desktop linux
version of Opera runs fine on the XO) than in the Browse activivity
that comes with 711. I think this is primarily caused by the fact that
browser contents in the Browse activity are scaled up, and thus, it's
taxing Flash's engine more.

In general, the bigger the dimensions of the Flash applet, the more
CPU horsepower it eats. Thus, using the same applet, if you zoom in on
a page with Flash in Opera, you'll see performance drop and if you
zoom out a page and thus shrink the flash applet size, you'll see
performance improve.

Oh, I heard from Ben Schwartz that the Browse activity in 8.2.0 is
based on Firefox 3. If so, that would be interesting because my
general experience is that the Flash plugin performs better in Firefox
3 than in MS IE or Opera 9.x.

Anyway, am installing 766 and will report back on Flash/Gnash test results.

-Naz

-- 
Carlos Nazareno
http://www.object404.com

interactive media specialist
zen graffiti studios
naz at zengraffiti.com