# Is it possible to make Flash videos play smoothly?



## qubit (Mar 22, 2013)

I'm wondering this, because I've just read an article about the BBC bringing new programs to the iPlayer only, which uses Flash.

Some Flash videos play better than others, but they all jerk and stutter to some degree and that's not acceptable if I'm going to be watching long TV programs.

When I check the videos with Fraps, the framerate is never constant, rising and falling by a large amount constantly, which is the source of this jerkiness and stuttering. As far as I can tell, this is inherent in the Flash platform itself as I've seen it do this on every computer I've ever used, regardless of graphics power, brand etc and where there are clearly no buffering issues due to low internet bandwidth. Even if a Flash video were to play at a constant 25 or 30fps it would still be acceptable, even though it produces judder. At least it's consistent.

So, is it possible to make Flash videos play smoothly once and for all?


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## RCoon (Mar 22, 2013)

There are ten billion flags you have to put into the video before you hardcode it into a flash format. You can blame that on the uploaders, this is also the reason some youtube videos dont buffer all the way, because retards dont know how to code their flash videos.
You can actually fix some of these things by inserting the flags into the direct url of the video, but half of the time that isnt supported.

EDIT: You can always go to the global flash player settings page in your browser and make some changes, this vastly improved things for the computers at work.


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## syeef (Mar 22, 2013)

qubit said:


> So, is it possible to make Flash videos play smoothly once and for all?



Try this:

Right-click the flash video player and click Settings, then under Display uncheck "Enable hardware acceleration" and Close. Then restart browser.


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## newtekie1 (Mar 22, 2013)

RCoon said:


> this is also the reason some youtube videos dont buffer all the way, because retards dont know how to code their flash videos



That has nothing to do with the uploaders, 99% of people unploading to youtube aren't uploading flash videos, they are uploading traditional video files and youtube is converting them to flash.



syeef said:


> Try this:
> 
> Right-click the flash video player and click Settings, then under Display uncheck "Enable hardware acceleration" and Close. Then restart browser.



This is one of the first things to do, especially if you use your GPU for folding or WCG.


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## caleb (Mar 22, 2013)

The reason YouTube doesn't load to 100% is very simple. Bandwidth savings.
Back on subject...


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## RCoon (Mar 22, 2013)

newtekie1 said:


> That has nothing to do with the uploaders, 99% of people unploading to youtube aren't uploading flash videos, they are uploading traditional video files and youtube is converting them to flash.
> 
> 
> 
> This is one of the first things to do, especially if you use your GPU for folding or WCG.



Sorry, let me rephrase. The uploaders for the bbc iplayer are the people to blame for poor performance, i then went on to say that the same issue is with youtube but you can add flags to the url to solve these issues.
I did not mean to imply the youtube users sending their videos are to blame.


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## qubit (Mar 22, 2013)

I disabled acceleration, but it didn't make any difference.

It really seems to vary from video to video. I can understand the blurry homemade videos not playing smoothly, but the professionally produced ones I really wouldn't have expected to see these problems by now, years later and with the high network bandwidth available to internet users nowadays.

Even the relatively smooth-playing ones normally have the framerate running all over the place in Fraps. It's fucking retarded. Sorry, I'm really annoyed about this.


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## RCoon (Mar 22, 2013)

qubit said:


> I disabled acceleration, but it didn't make any difference.
> 
> It really seems to vary from video to video. I can understand the blurry homemade videos not playing smoothly, but the professionally produced ones I really wouldn't have expected to see these problems by now, years later and with the high network bandwidth available to internet users nowadays.
> 
> Even the relatively smooth-playing ones normally have the framerate running all over the place in Fraps. It's fucking retarded. Sorry, I'm really annoyed about this.



I cant wait for Flash to die, personally.


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## qubit (Mar 22, 2013)

RCoon said:


> I cant wait for Flash to die, personally.



+1. The number of times the sodding plugin crashes in Firefox lately forcing me to restart the browser really pisses me off.

And it would be really nice if we had a platform that actually played videos properly. I can see where Steve Jobs was coming from with this one and I didn't often agree with him.


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## Peter1986C (Mar 22, 2013)

qubit said:


> I'm wondering this, because I've just read an article about the BBC bringing new programs to the iPlayer only, which uses Flash.
> 
> Some Flash videos play better than others, but they all jerk and stutter to some degree and that's not acceptable if I'm going to be watching long TV programs.
> 
> ...



Use the Flash Video Downloader add-on to download the video, then play the video using VLC.


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## RCoon (Mar 22, 2013)

Chevalr1c said:


> Use the Flash Video Downloader add-on to download the video, then play the video using VLC.



defeats the point of streaming. may as well pirate it if that's the solution?


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## Peter1986C (Mar 22, 2013)

Less extreme: right-click on the video -> settings -> storage icon -> move the slider to the right. May or may not solve the issue.


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## newtekie1 (Mar 22, 2013)

qubit said:


> +1. The number of times the sodding plugin crashes in Firefox lately forcing me to restart the browser really pisses me off.
> 
> And it would be really nice if we had a platform that actually played videos properly. I can see where Steve Jobs was coming from with this one and I didn't often agree with him.



I don't have problems with Flash videos stuttering other than when hardware acceleration is on and I'm folding with my GPU.  Youtube videos are smooth and when I have fraps monitoring the framerate it is pretty steady between 30-35FPS.  The same is true of most other flash videos such as hulu and nbc's videos, never tried BBC's iPlayer though.


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