Getting smooth/watchable flash/netflix video on old PC with pre-sse2 CPU (Radeon HD 4670 Ice Q AGP)
I have an old tower with roughly these specs:
AMD Barton 3200+ 2.4 ghz CPU
2 GB ddr ram
Ice Q Radeon HD 4670 AGP 1GB gpu
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo
let me know if any more information is necessary.
I used to play flash videos on this computer without issue back when I had windows xp and radeon 9800se and radeon 9600xt both have less than 256mb of video memory. The tower also ran TES IV: Oblivion without much issue.
When I first installed Ubuntu on the tower a couple years ago, I couldn't get flash to work at all. I discovered that this had to do with flash only using the CPU (from what I understand flash no longer makes use of a dedicated gpu to render graphics, I have a strong feeling that this is closely related to my problem/solution) and that my CPU did not have sse2 capabilities.
Along came pipelight which allowed me to use the windows version of flash piped through wine. Flash was working great for a while. Then I upgraded or reinstalled a few months later and I noticed that flash was actually unreasonably choppy. I'm not sure if this is related to the switch to HTML5 or not.
I should mention that VLC can play HD videos without issue. For example, I can run a 1080p and 720p video at the same time in their own instance of vlc with a 23" monitor and 42" tv plugged in without any kind of latency or choppiness. If I change to two 1080p videos I start to get mild video choppiness at high intensity rendering scenes. Obviously the tower is capable of rendering the video, but I feel very strongly like the issue is that flash/netflix is trying to render everything with my cpu and no gpu.
Netflix works with pipelight, but plays as choppy as flash on youtube or other sites. I have tried all the suggestions in the FAQ for fixing choppy video in netflix. Netflix appears to be choppy for the same reason flash is, and not for any of the common reasons people are experiencing.
I have tried Xubuntu and a couple of other lightweight distros to see if I could get smooth flash/netflix video but I have not had any luck yet. I am open to suggestions. Does anyone have an idea of how I can get flash/netflix video playing well on this tower? I'd like to run Ubuntu or similar (with different DE) but am ultimately open to any distro to get this working.
Thanks for reading. Please let me know any more information I can provide to help find a solution.
Categories
- All Categories
- 51 LFX Mentorship
- 104 LFX Mentorship: Linux Kernel
- 576 Linux Foundation IT Professional Programs
- 304 Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 125 Advanced Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 53 DevOps Engineer IT Professional Program
- 61 Cloud Native Developer IT Professional Program
- 5 Express Training Courses
- 5 Express Courses - Discussion Forum
- 2K Training Courses
- 19 LFC110 Class Forum
- 7 LFC131 Class Forum
- 27 LFD102 Class Forum
- 158 LFD103 Class Forum
- 20 LFD121 Class Forum
- 1 LFD137 Class Forum
- 61 LFD201 Class Forum
- 1 LFD210 Class Forum
- LFD210-CN Class Forum
- 1 LFD213 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 128 LFD232 Class Forum
- LFD237 Class Forum
- 23 LFD254 Class Forum
- 611 LFD259 Class Forum
- 105 LFD272 Class Forum
- 1 LFD272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 1 LFD273 Class Forum
- 2 LFS145 Class Forum
- 24 LFS200 Class Forum
- 739 LFS201 Class Forum
- 1 LFS201-JP クラス フォーラム
- 11 LFS203 Class Forum
- 75 LFS207 Class Forum
- 300 LFS211 Class Forum
- 54 LFS216 Class Forum
- 47 LFS241 Class Forum
- 41 LFS242 Class Forum
- 37 LFS243 Class Forum
- 11 LFS244 Class Forum
- 36 LFS250 Class Forum
- 1 LFS250-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS251 Class Forum
- 140 LFS253 Class Forum
- LFS254 Class Forum
- 1.1K LFS258 Class Forum
- 10 LFS258-JP クラス フォーラム
- 93 LFS260 Class Forum
- 132 LFS261 Class Forum
- 33 LFS262 Class Forum
- 80 LFS263 Class Forum
- 15 LFS264 Class Forum
- 11 LFS266 Class Forum
- 18 LFS267 Class Forum
- 17 LFS268 Class Forum
- 23 LFS269 Class Forum
- 203 LFS272 Class Forum
- 1 LFS272-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS274 Class Forum
- LFS281 Class Forum
- 236 LFW211 Class Forum
- 172 LFW212 Class Forum
- 7 SKF100 Class Forum
- SKF200 Class Forum
- 903 Hardware
- 219 Drivers
- 74 I/O Devices
- 44 Monitors
- 116 Multimedia
- 209 Networking
- 101 Printers & Scanners
- 85 Storage
- 763 Linux Distributions
- 88 Debian
- 66 Fedora
- 15 Linux Mint
- 13 Mageia
- 24 openSUSE
- 142 Red Hat Enterprise
- 33 Slackware
- 13 SUSE Enterprise
- 357 Ubuntu
- 479 Linux System Administration
- 41 Cloud Computing
- 70 Command Line/Scripting
- Github systems admin projects
- 95 Linux Security
- 78 Network Management
- 108 System Management
- 49 Web Management
- 68 Mobile Computing
- 23 Android
- 30 Development
- 1.2K New to Linux
- 1.1K Getting Started with Linux
- 537 Off Topic
- 131 Introductions
- 217 Small Talk
- 21 Study Material
- 826 Programming and Development
- 278 Kernel Development
- 514 Software Development
- 928 Software
- 260 Applications
- 184 Command Line
- 3 Compiling/Installing
- 76 Games
- 316 Installation
- 61 All In Program
- 61 All In Forum
Upcoming Training
-
August 20, 2018
Kubernetes Administration (LFS458)
-
August 20, 2018
Linux System Administration (LFS301)
-
August 27, 2018
Open Source Virtualization (LFS462)
-
August 27, 2018
Linux Kernel Debugging and Security (LFD440)