OS and Firmware testing for XO 1.5 B2: gnash

[Tiago Marques]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 4:43 AM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
>>> Gnash and youtube is a no go. No error now, just a black screen
>>
>> Within the last month, Youtube changed their default player to require
>> Adobe Flash 10, including ActionScript 3.  Gnash does not yet implement
>> AS3 properly -- that's why you got a black rectangle.

That's very unfortunate. It's great that it still works but the
turnaround time for each small changing is "killing" gnash. Flash
sucks big time, IMHO, but it's hard to turn away from it.

>>
>> The (shrinking) gnash team is working on this, but they won't have
>> even an internal version that plays today's youtube before the end of
>> November -- maybe much longer.
>>
>> There's a hack though:  rewrite the URL from:
>>
>>  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeeie9l9taM
>>
>> to
>>
>>  http://www.youtube.com/v/zeeie9l9taM
>>
>> That uses the old player.  (The videos themselves are unchanged, it's
>> just the stupid stuff around the edges, like the Play/Pause button,
>> that's causing the trouble.)

Thanks for the input, I'll try to test that and see the differences to
Flash. Unfortunately, that's a workaround that will be hard to
implement on a shipping distro.

>
> I find
> both gnash and swfdec to be way too unstable and they are
> massive cpu hogs so I use the totem YouTube plugin that works very
> well.

Indeed, that is a better solution. I was saving an update for when I
get the chance to test it on the XO-1 but here it is:
There's a script for greasemonkey that can run videos in browser with
mplayer performance, with too little bugs and too litle to update
between changes(it seems). Plus, it's not hindered by Adobe's patents,
lack of documentation, cooperation and what not.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24999

The script is somewhat broken but can be simply fixed by replacing a line:

http://userscripts.org/topics/38351

It needs a mozilla mplayer plugin, I used gecko-mplayer, based on
gnome-mplayer but with too little dependencies on the gnome
(gnome-common on Gentoo, IIRC).

I expect performance to be very good on the XO-1. I have tested it in
the XO-1.5 but it unfortunately is crashing with a green screen on
video, a problem that Mikus has already described in Mplayer on the
test builds.
Performance on my desktop is far and beyond of what flash can provide
and there are no dropped frames, which is something I can't say for
flash even at some smaller resolutions.

There's only a slight problem, the script doesn't run 900Kb/s videos
and no 720p, which I couldn't check ATM. The lack of 720p or 1080p
doesn't seem a problem to me even on the XO-1.5, unless one can
somehow access the decoding hardware in Linux(can we?).

It would be great if it was a way to port this work to Browse. Does it
seem feasible?
I expect to test this on the XO-1 later this week.

Best regards,
Tiago Marques

>
> Peter
>