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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

I don't have that problem at all. I was hesitant to move to 64 bit but the Flash player is screaming fast on my machine. I can easily playback 1680x1050 YouTube videos without a glitch. It's more than possible that your hardware configuration is the cause. Get in touch with Adobe and let them know your config, the problem might be fixable.

PS: I run Ubuntu as well of course.

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"It's more than possible that your hardware configuration is the cause"

Its definitely not the hardware horsepower itself, as I have very good performance on 64 vista.

I'm also running with the very latest nvidia binary drivers, I have an intel dual core E2200 - not cutting edge but flash will actually take up an entire core with small animations, so it definitely seems like a bug to me.

"Get in touch with Adobe and let them know your config, the problem might be fixable."

I've spent a while (way way more than I ever wanted for something that they market as 'plug in' / 'just works') going through the ubuntu forums and launchpad, some stuff seems like fixeable problems that maybe I just couldn't fix, but heres a list of problems I have:

* Sometimes opening a new firefox/chromium tab/window and loading a website with flash will crash it, crashing all flash instances - so if I'm listening to a google tech talk or something I have to restart it and go hunt the on the timeline.

* Sometimes controllers just stop responding to clicks ( http://www.khattam.info/2009/08/18/solved-flashplugin-contro... )

* Flash will flicker as I scroll down firefox/chromium.

* This has stopped now, but at one point flash crashing wouldn't free its memory, and Xorg just started consuming more and more memory, bringing the entire computer to an almost halt!

* Some flash players/gamers/whatever when I'd press the fullscreen button would get from xorg as my resolution the sum of my 2 monitors - 2560x1024, which means they'd get clipped in half or they would get letterboxed (msnbc.com and youtube.com for instance) while others such as video.google.com works just fine.

These are just things off the top of my head - it seems flash is the #1 problem for 64 bit ubuntu from quick glances at the 64 bit forums, I've had a lot more problems, I tend to avoid flash websites as a result.

Are you using the vanilla player or the x64 player?

I've tried both the apt package and downloading directly from adobe, to be honest I don't remember if there was a difference in problems, or just the same set of them, either way it didn't 'just work'.

Let me rephrase that. Did you install the normal plugin (which is not x64) or the beta x64?

In case of the package, which package exactly did you install?

I went through a phase I tried installing everything under the sun and looked around quite a bit (the packages directly from adobe, different apt packages, random bash scripts I found online..) so I actually don't remember what I tested and didn't.

What I have _at the moment_ and doesn't work that well, I got through the 'flashplugin-nonfree' package which if I understand is the 'preferred' way to install flash on ubuntu 64.

It is the 'normal' way but I'm not sure it's the 'preferred' one for a x64 system.

Seriously, are you SURE you tried the x64 version? From the looks of it, you didn't, so I'd suggest you following the steps to get the x64 package.

Something like this should work: http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/install-64-bit-adobe-f... http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/install-flash-10-ubuntu-linux-...

It's not flashplugin-nonfree, as the x64 version is still a beta package available separately (but drastically better than the standard one on x64 machines).

I had definitely tried that before, recall issuing a 'mkdir .mozilla/plugins' & moving a .so in there. Can't remember why I rolled that back and reinstalled it through apt thought.

Anyways trying it again nonetheless, the blinking is still going on with scrolling, going to see if performance/crashing at least improves.

That's incredible. I've been running the 64-bit flash player in Ubuntu for a while and it fails horribly at high resolution video. Two questions:

1) Where did you get the 1680x1050 youtube video? The 1080p video I tried was 1920x798. Can you give me a link so I can test with it?

2) Which CPU and video card do you have? My Core 2 Duo E8400 and NVIDIA 8800GT don't even get close to cutting it. Anything above 480p video and I get dropped frames and horrible tearing.

Edit: I have no problem playing 1080p video in native video players like mplayer and vlc, only flash.

That's my experience with any recent ATI card in Linux. Flash doesn't have to be involved. High resolution or full-screen video with a quad-core AMD Phenom and 8GB of ram results in dropped frames and tearing.

I fixed it by switching back to NVIDIA.

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