Flash 10.2 beta GPU Decoding - WORKS (but not in Boxee)

**theydroppedme** · December 1st, 2010, 08:43 PM

Well, much to my delight, Adobe's new Flash 10.2 has GPU decoding support for linux. I installed it in firefox, and what do you know, 1080p flash plays PERFECTLY on my 2ghz single core AMD with NVIDIA 8400gs video. Before, even 480p was too much to handle, and 360p was choppy.

Since I would LOVE to be able to watch hulu et al on my boxee computer, I tried to get it working in Boxee. Replaced all libflashplayer.so files on my computer with the 10.2 version, including the one under /opt/boxee/system/players/flashplayer/xulrunner-i486-linux/bin/plugins/. However, now when I try to play a flash video it plays the audio, but no video is displayed. The command line shows a "ERROR: ld.so: object './bxoverride-i486-linux.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored" error in the output.

So does anyone else have any ideas on how to get 10.2 working in boxee? This would be a major feature for many Boxee users, and make running linux a viable option for many people.

Thanks,

Greg

**Silverlock** · December 1st, 2010, 09:19 PM

The odd bit is that it does kind of work. We do get audio. And if the hardware isn't capable of GPU acceleration, even the video works (it did on my eee 901 - audio & video, no reduction in CPU usage). But on my Revo 3610, same as you; audio, but no video.

**VeeDubb65** · December 2nd, 2010, 02:24 AM

have you tried manually copying the libflashplayer.so from 10.2 over all the ones in boxee? I don't actually know if that would help or not, but I'd like to know.

**theydroppedme** · December 2nd, 2010, 03:15 AM

yeah, i even went as far as finding all libflashplayer.so files on the computer and replacing them with the new version. I'm at a loss here as to what the problem is...

**dan1son** · December 2nd, 2010, 10:35 AM

The intention of the new Flash player is to put ALL of the work in the GPU for decoding and playback. The old flash player only used the GPU for decoding, playback was still done the old fashion way. If boxee works as I suspect (this code is their only closed source part) they make flash paint in a background buffer, then boxee pulls the frames, does whatever work needs to be done, and plops them onto the screen. If the new flash version forgoes drawing them into a buffer, boxee can't get to the frames.

I also suspect the new version (1.0x) of boxee doesn't do this with flash. It probably just lets flash player handle all of that itself. That might be the reason they switched from Gecko to Webkit.

**theydroppedme** · December 2nd, 2010, 11:31 AM

So I just found this document from Adobe describing the stage video in 10.2:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashpla...age_video.html

It seems that the player is rendered blank, and the video is rendered underneath it. So I'm guessing that the browser or however boxee handles flash objects needs to be modified to display the "video stage." Any ideas? I feel like it should be a simple fix (in xulrunner possibly?)

-Greg

**theydroppedme** · December 2nd, 2010, 11:43 AM

And now I think I have identified the problem :-)

It seems like the flash objects need to have the parameter wmode="direct" so that the video is drawn directly on the screen. I know you can change the wmode in the html code for the page by modifying the object tag and adding <param name="wmode" value="opaque"> and the embed tag with wmode="opaque" but I'm not 100% sure that it will override the settings. If anyone can figure out how to change these settings in Boxee's browser, or automatically modify the html of incoming pages, I think we might be in business.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to try any of this until tomorrow afternoon...

-Greg

**Silverlock** · December 2nd, 2010, 08:54 PM

I gave your suggestion a shot and didn't see any difference. Now, I had zero idea of how to embed flash into a page, so here's what I did. I grabbed the embed link for the video I was trying on YouTube last night and I put this up on a local webserver. The Boxee brower was able to display it with 10.1, so I added the bits in red and switched the flash player to 10.2. Still no video. I also tried it with wmode "opaque" as I wasn't sure from your message which one to use. But it didn't make any difference either.

Code:

<html>
<body>
<object width="640" height="385">
<param name="wmode" value="direct"></param>
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/o1wQV3gLn9E?fs=1&amp;hl=en_U
S"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/o1wQV3gLn9E?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385" wmode="direct"></embed>
</object>
</body>
</html>

Now, since I had no idea what I was doing (I grok HTML, but I've never dug into Flash), it's entirely possible that I missed the point completely. Any thoughts?

**theydroppedme** · December 6th, 2010, 06:21 PM

well I've tried just about everything trying to get this to work. I even tried setting up a proxy to apply the change to all html traffic, and installed the debug plugin. From what I can tell, the xulrunner webapp boxee uses to skin the hulu-type sites is changing the display mode on its own. Unless I can find a way to change the display mode globally for the flash plugin or change the way boxee plays flash videos, I think we're going to have to wait for the boxee team to make the changes themselves. Thankfully it should be an incredibly easy fix for the boxee team to make things compatible.

Boxee has their xulrunner code obfuscated pretty well, so changing that code seems like a wasted effort.

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or knows of a way to globally set the flash plugin's render/window mode let me know.

**Silverlock** · December 6th, 2010, 07:37 PM

It was worth a shot. Having seen the excellent PQ that 10.2 can produce, the chance that Boxee could benefit from it Right Now with some minor tweaks was too good to pass up.