ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <346289@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Gentlemen,

To hopefully quell the amount of comments this bug report is getting,
I've taken some time to fill in the description of this bug report with
a summary of the situation.  Please take a moment to read it.

Really, this is not a video driver bug specifically, but rather an issue
with how Adobe Flash is implemented to *use* the video driver.  That's
why the behavior can vary depending on the type or version of video
driver being tested.  Also, really it's not just one specific bug, but a
collection of issues several of which are fundamental design flaws in
Adobe's implementation.  Adobe has provided some nicely written and
illustrated materials explaining these design issues, which I've linked
to in the description and would encourage you to check out.

I am not sure there is really anything we can do at the distro level.
There are a couple workarounds I can think of, but I have a feeling
they'd end up causing more breakages than they solve.  It would be
interesting to experiment with them, but unfortunately my plate is quite
full with other projects so I will leave the experiments to any of you
that would like to indulge your curiosity.

In the one case, where we would force OverrideGPUValidation=true as a
default in flashplugin-nonfree, this is quite straightforward to
implement - just include a config file in the flashplugin-nonfree
debian/ directory to be installed to /etc/adobe/ when the package is
installed.  The challenge is that we would need this tested across a
breadth of different video driver combinations, with and without Compiz
and/or Unity enabled.  This could be crowd-sourced, with results
tabulated in a wiki similar to how we've done with other testing (see
the results table on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/NouveauEvaluation
... something akin to that would be nice).

The other option I can think of would be to redirect the 'fullscreen'
action in Flash, to launch Totem or whatever the default video player
is.  For this option, we'd need to see a working proof of concept that
folks could play with.  This has some obvious tradeoffs in terms of
usability so the benefit would need to be quite striking.  I think this
would be a fairly straightforward project one of you could do.

There could well be other options as well I've not thought of.  In any
case, what we need are proof of concepts that demonstrate that they do
indeed work.  Please keep in mind that what works for you may not work
as well for someone else, but for Ubuntu we need to address as broad a
range of user needs as possible, so the more testing you can do of your
concept, the better.

I hope all this information is useful, sorry this is not an issue we can
trivially fix at the distro level.  I am hopeful that this explanation
inspires someone to produce a good proof of concept of some better
solution, that would let the Desktop team invest resources into getting
it integrated into Ubuntu proper for everyone.

** Package changed: xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu) => flashplugin-
nonfree (Ubuntu)

** Changed in: flashplugin-nonfree (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => New

-- 
Choppy Flash playback in full screen
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/346289
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