Flash Plugin For Cortex A8

[Caine]

Found this on beagleboard.org. Perhaps OPT can look into this and incorporate it into the firmware if it works.

 

[kuru]

Oh looky there, that's a treat. But it's just a demo?

 

[WizardStan]

I've submitted a request for the demo. We'll see what becomes of it. Says it'll probably take 2 or 3 days to be approved.

 

[Dead1nside]

Hmmm, would be great wouldn't it. I hope TI and Adobe can work on getting Cortex A8 devices as supported, would stop us having to use all the flash workarounds.

 

[CPUnltd]

personally, I see gnash and lightspark as more advanced than flash itself... granted they are missing a few things that keep them from being 100% compatible with flash as is, they are enough competition for flash to step their game up (hence the recent release of the newer 64bit linux version of flash (which adobe said they weren't gonna do... they had planned to leave 64bit linux users stuck with the worst flaw in flash history... yeah, that sits well with me). They are not happy being outdone in their own game. I personally desire the ability to remove flash if I so choose... so go anead and get what you can from them, but I won't be using it. More power to you either way

 

[WizardStan]

2 to 3 days, 2 to 3 hours, whatever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjL6VBWaHrU
Long story short: no.
It works, vector videos are pretty good. Thanks to frameskip they are watchable. Some are quite enjoyable even.
Tried a few flash games, all worked, most were painfully slow. Even overclocked, most of Adult Swim was unbearable.
Youtube is a slideshow. At stock 500Mhz, it gets maybe 1 frame per second. Overclocked to 1000 it was maybe 5 frames at best.

Conclusion: As it stands this "demo" is totally not viable for video playback. Useful for fun flash animations and some games, but youtube and other streaming video sites is outside its abilities.

 

[Prometheus]

Colour me surprised! I honestly thought that it would be the other way around (good for video, but bad for games). :blink:

 

[jdbye]

2 to 3 days, 2 to 3 hours, whatever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjL6VBWaHrU
Long story short: no.
It works, vector videos are pretty good. Thanks to frameskip they are watchable. Some are quite enjoyable even.
Tried a few flash games, all worked, most were painfully slow. Even overclocked, most of Adult Swim was unbearable.
Youtube is a slideshow. At stock 500Mhz, it gets maybe 1 frame per second. Overclocked to 1000 it was maybe 5 frames at best.

Conclusion: As it stands this "demo" is totally not viable for video playback. Useful for fun flash animations and some games, but youtube and other streaming video sites is outside its abilities.

Firefox is already pretty slow on the Pandora so I'm not surprised, Chromium runs a lot faster though and I believe it supports the same plugin format? It might run faster on that. Will be trying it myself as soon as I get approved, probably keeping it for occasional newgrounds use

 

[WizardStan]

Chromium runs a lot faster though and I believe it supports the same plugin format? It might run faster on that.

If you figure out how to get plugins in Chromium let me know. I'm running it with --enable-plugins but it still doesn't seem to be picking up anything.

 

[jdbye]

Chromium runs a lot faster though and I believe it supports the same plugin format? It might run faster on that.

If you figure out how to get plugins in Chromium let me know. I'm running it with --enable-plugins but it still doesn't seem to be picking up anything.

aboutlugins shows the plugin after I put it in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, I believe firefox should be able to load from that path as well. Haven't tried any flash content yet, but since it's showing up I assume it works, trying it in a few minutes.

Edit: At 500mhz in Chromium 4, Youtube is still a slideshow. However, at 1ghz, the video played acceptably well for about 3 seconds before the plugin crashed. I tried again, and it crashed at the same point - so it doesn't look like this plugin is stable enough for general use yet, but it's showing promise. It might be more stable in Firefox though?

Also, flash ads don't seem to slow down Chromium at all at 500mhz, so that's good.

Edit2: Just tried Line Rider, that's perfect for touchscreens. Drawing is responsive at 1ghz, still quite usable at 500mhz, however playback is slow, at 17-18FPS with no lines on screen at 1ghz and lower the more lines there are. It might be playable for a line rider fan (it seems to be a popular game) but I'm not a huge fan, just thought it'd be nice on the touchscreen - and it really is

It's also worth noting that line rider runs at a whopping 40 FPS on my dual core 2ghz laptop with a few lines on screen, so I didn't expect much from the Pandora. It actually runs better than I expected - drawing is responsive at 1ghz, and still usable at 500mhz if you draw slowly.

Flash videos on Newgrounds seem to play well at 900mhz (800mhz also worked quite well), and didn't crash - Newgrounds was the main reason I was interested in flash, so I'm pretty happy about that. It depends on the video though - one of the videos was perfectly smooth at 900mhz (except for one part in the video where it used alpha transparency), the other got a lot of frameskip when the screen scrolled or zoomed in but was otherwise smooth. Minitube is better for Youtube at the moment, even though it's not integrated into the browser, but I'm probably going to be using this quite a bit for newgrounds

Edit3: That was all at high quality (the default). Low quality makes the above mentioned frameskip a bit less, but not a lot - and high quality looks a lot better. Medium quality is probably the best setting for speed vs quality - it looks good on the high DPI Pandora screen.

 

[Reyhn]

That's great news, hope it will be improved in the near future. Real youtube (360p ofc) would be so cool.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, as this is just a demo, I guess they are still working on it. For the moment, it sounds like it doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration.
If TI theirselves do the port, they might probably use the DSP for something later on.

 

[Zeno Arrow]

Well, as this is just a demo, I guess they are still working on it. For the moment, it sounds like it doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration.
If TI theirselves do the port, they might probably use the DSP for something later on.

I find it odd that the state of the port is only at demo level. My Nokia N900 has a Cortex-A8 and runs Flash just fine. Maemo is Linux based too, so it's not like it's a port to a brand new OS.

Don't know what else to say. Perhaps someone can explain.

 

[fettouhi]

Well, as this is just a demo, I guess they are still working on it. For the moment, it sounds like it doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration.
If TI theirselves do the port, they might probably use the DSP for something later on.

I find it odd that the state of the port is only at demo level. My Nokia N900 has a Cortex-A8 and runs Flash just fine. Maemo is Linux based too, so it's not like it's a port to a brand new OS.

Don't know what else to say. Perhaps someone can explain.

None of the flash plugins that are out for linux are using hardware acceleration. Hence, the lack of perforamce of them.

 

[WizardStan]

My Nokia N900 has a Cortex-A8 and runs Flash just fine.

How does the N900 handle streaming video in Flash anyway? All I can find about it is how it has it's own special player for youtube which is hardly a fair comparison to Flash. If the N900 can handle generic Flash streaming video, that gives even more hope for us eventually.
As to why they can't just use the N900 plugin, it's because Nokia payed a license to get the code to tweak it for their system and build their own plugin first, and no one else is allowed to use that code. If TI wants a general purpose plugin for A8 processors they need to start with the basic code and retweak it themselves.

 

[meandu229]

My Nokia N900 has a Cortex-A8 and runs Flash just fine.

How does the N900 handle streaming video in Flash anyway? All I can find about it is how it has it's own special player for youtube which is hardly a fair comparison to Flash. If the N900 can handle generic Flash streaming video, that gives even more hope for us eventually.
As to why they can't just use the N900 plugin, it's because Nokia payed a license to get the code to tweak it for their system and build their own plugin first, and no one else is allowed to use that code. If TI wants a general purpose plugin for A8 processors they need to start with the basic code and retweak it themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4PQx_cc0cY quick example,

My n900 runs youtube in browser perfectly fine, not sure about other sites, games except basic ones are slow though

 

[Zeno Arrow]

@fettouhi
Hardware acceleration or no, performance (at least for YouTube) is fine.

My Nokia N900 has a Cortex-A8 and runs Flash just fine.

How does the N900 handle streaming video in Flash anyway? All I can find about it is how it has it's own special player for youtube which is hardly a fair comparison to Flash. If the N900 can handle generic Flash streaming video, that gives even more hope for us eventually.
As to why they can't just use the N900 plugin, it's because Nokia payed a license to get the code to tweak it for their system and build their own plugin first, and no one else is allowed to use that code. If TI wants a general purpose plugin for A8 processors they need to start with the basic code and retweak it themselves.

As meandu229 says, Flash support is in the browser, not through using a standalone player. Yes, Nokia paid for their Flash player, but you'd expect Adobe to want to help TI with their port, and Adobe could use the N900 code for reference.

If Adobe aren't helping out then I guess you're right.

 

[Dead1nside]

OMAP3 powers so many mobile devices, that you'd think it'd be really high up their priority list. Just whether they want to give away a generic plugin for Linux, for free, rather than licensing out to handset manufacturers the plugin, is the problem.

 

[Tor]

I find it odd that the state of the port is only at demo level. My Nokia N900 has a Cortex-A8 and runs Flash just fine. Maemo is Linux based too, so it's not like it's a port to a brand new OS.

Don't know what else to say. Perhaps someone can explain.

The TI demo is based on version 10.1, the N900 uses version 9 (9.0.159.0 at the moment). They are very different as far as I understand. 10.1 has the possibility to be accelerated, and one such version was demonstrated by Adobe a year ago or more, on the N900, so it's not like it's not possible to run accelerated 10.x on the Cortex-A8.

 

[kuru]

N900 youtube is choppy when not played fullscreen most of the time. I have lately run into videos I need to watch at 240p instead of 360p because they would look like a fast slideshow. Last I remember was the CGR review of Dirt 2. I don't mind turning down the resolution a little, although it might hurt when using the tv-out. Putting those minor grieves aside I am very happy with the flash performance. Let's hope TI go for a non-commercial solution :/