Thinkpads Forum

I have a relatively high spec T60p (T7600, Firegl V5250, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate, 1400x1050) which can play 720p Youtube videos fine, but stutters tremendously with 1080p video playback (5-10 fps?). I've tried right clicking the video and selecting/unselecting Settings->Enable Hardware Acceleration, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Is this expected or is there something I can do to help with this?

I noticed that the "ATI Mobility FireGL V5250" driver that Windows installed is from 12/1/2008 (8.561.0.0). Is there a newer version that would help, and if so, why doesn't Windows know about it? I did find this, though I haven't tried it: http://www.amd-drivers.com/download-Mob ... 32bit.html

It does look like Windows mentions an optional update to the "FlexView Display", but I can't imagine that making a difference.

Thanks!

Are you using Firefox? Firefox does not have GPU accelerated flash player, so the CPU will be doing much of the work. If so, try switching to chrome, which should have flash acceleration enabled by default.

Even though the core 2 duo processors in the T6x series are still very usable today, streaming youtube videos at 1080p will be laggy without hardware acceleration from a dedicated GPU.

Yeah I was using firefox. I tried in chrome and didn't see a difference but it looks like hardware acceleration wasn't enabled so I overrode it by doing this: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/enable-h ... hrome.html

That made a large difference. I'm still dropping some frames and even when not dropping frames the playback isn't that smooth but it's a big improvement. Thanks!

If you want stutter free 1080p videos, you can also look into youtube clients such as minitube which does not rely on flash. I have personally used it myself and the performance is excellent. I can even play 1080p videos fullscreen on my T43 with only ~60% cpu usage.

I have a Z61p which is virtually an exact clone of your T60p. The only way I can play those videos properly is to use Microsoft Internet Explorer; if I use Google Chrome I find playback is terrible, e.g. very slow and juddery and out of sync etc. However using IE is the best option but will not entirely provide perfect playback; for that you will need either a newer Thinkpad model or get yourself a Advanced Docking station and install a desktop PC graphics card. I'm currently wondering whether to bother trying more graphics cards in my dock until one works, or to just simply buy a newer more powerful Thinkpad model. The dock is rather nifty though...

Thanks for the replies.

I've been playing with minitube and the performance is very impressive. Instantaneous and smooth playback of 1080p with very little CPU usage. I'm surprised that none of the browser implementations even come close. What does it use instead of flash?

To update your graphics driver go to the AMD website and download their GPU driver update tool. It will give you the latest drivers available. They will be drivers for the standard consumer version of the graphics card and not the FireGL, but at this point I don't think you would really care.

brchan wrote:Are you using Firefox? Firefox does not have GPU accelerated flash player, so the CPU will be doing much of the work. If so, try switching to chrome, which should have flash acceleration enabled by default.

Does the GPU in the T60 in principle support flash acceleration? Or is it something that can be utilized with software hooks only, without requiring explicit support from the hardware?

brchan wrote:If you want stutter free 1080p videos, you can also look into youtube clients such as minitube which does not rely on flash. I have personally used it myself and the performance is excellent. I can even play 1080p videos fullscreen on my T43 with only ~60% cpu usage.

I tried minitube based on your recommendation in another thread, and liked it a lot. Once thing I had a problem with is scaling. For some reason it would not scale well on a low-resolution screen (I tried it on my X32 with 1024x768), and the picture, in full screen mode, would be cropped. Have you encountered anything like this?

What does it use instead of flash?

Looking at the contents of the installer, it uses parts of VLC.

axur-delmeria wrote:

What does it use instead of flash?

Looking at the contents of the installer, it uses parts of VLC.

Flash is installable as a plugin under Firefox. Just go to the Adobe Flash install page, request the installation, uncheck all the optional software boxes, and download the stub. Close Firefox. Open the "downloads" folder. Run the stub. It will pull in Flash, install it, and restart the browser. The default in the plugins menu will show as "always activate", but you can change to "ask" or "never", allowing you to experiment with different methods of handling Flash.

The Adobe menu also has a box for local storage. Upping the amount of local storage may help.

Hmmm... I wonder if using using this Greasemonkey script in combination with a native VLC installation would allow the same performance in browser:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube

precip9 wrote: Flash is installable as a plugin under Firefox.
[clip]
The Adobe menu also has a box for local storage. Upping the amount of local storage may help.

It's the flash browser plugin that's the performance issue and reason for this thread. I did try upping the local storage but it didn't help unfortunately. Looks like most videos only use 3KB so it's probably just some metadata and nothing that would help with streaming more efficiently.

Please post some Youtube links. I'd like to try this with some of my machines.

For unknown reason Firefox is currently playing back 1080p Youtube fairly well for me, lol. The only two changes I've made at this point are: installation of Minitube and updating of IE to version 11. I wonder if the IE update ended up updating some libraries that are shared by Firefox (IE 11 only seems to only provide 720p Youtube as the max resolution)

Does the performance increase apply to all videos previously? Resolution, and to a slightly less, but still noticeable degree, content (ex. fast moving/complex scenes) affect performance.

brchan wrote:Does the performance increase apply to all videos previously? Resolution, and to a slightly less, but still noticeable degree, content (ex. fast moving/complex scenes) affect performance.

It seemed like all videos, but I did just find an example that still plays very poorly at 1080p:
NOTE: violent gameplay, possibly NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-KDfab0c7Q

Probably an extreme example of fast moving/complex!

Apparently there is a side project of Firefox called Palemoon which is specially coded to be CPU and RAM light etc. I tried Minitube but the 1080p option was not working when selected, e.g. nothing changed and it still looked like 360p. I have only tried it on one old G40 laptop so far though.

The Intel chipset in a T60 is not capable of this, but I would think the FireGL could.

See http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-article ... psFAQ.aspx

and for download links

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-article ... ility.aspx

FWIW, I tried https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-KDfab0c7Q with two laptops:

X61s, 1.6gHz, Windows 8.1, 1080p rendered to 1024x768. Almost works, a little choppy. Seems limited by CPU pegging occasionally to 100%

W500, Intel graphics. Windows 7. Perfectly smooth, CPU usage average 15%, max 30%

Apparently there is a side project of Firefox called Palemoon which is specially coded to be CPU and RAM light etc.

If the cause of the choppy playback is Flash, then changing browsers might not yield any difference.
But hey, it can't hurt to try.

I tried Minitube but the 1080p option was not working when selected, e.g. nothing changed and it still looked like 360p. I have only tried it on one old G40 laptop so far though.

1. I really doubt a P4M can ever be fast enough to play 1080p. You'd probably need > 3 GHz to have a fighting chance.

2. The issue may be due to the G40's graphics. It's hard to expect much from such antiquated machines.

Pale Moon has different goals now (check the project main page), and honestly, as a long-time user, I haven't found it to actually be faster/lighter on RAM than Firefox. In any case, the flash/HTML5 playback is the bottleneck.

cacophony wrote:For unknown reason Firefox is currently playing back 1080p Youtube fairly well for me, lol.

This is no surprise as Firefox is actually the most efficient at software decoding MPEG-4. Chrome splits up decoding work between many different threads and the result is much slower performance on a machine with few or one CPUs or not-good interprocessor communications. I learned this by working to optimize 720p video on a T42, and most benchmarks indicate that the multiprocessor mode of the early core processors is not very efficient (i.e. with 2 CPU's you often see only 1.3x or 1.4x speedup on benchmarks like passmark). I had assumed it was the codecs that came with the install package for firefox. Flash is just a middleman between the raw mpeg stream and the video playback. Flash just defines file and packet formats. The MPEG reference implementation is actually doing all the work.

So stick with firefox if you want your computer to have the longest life playing video.

Have you tried using HTML5 instead of Flash?

I'm not the original poster, but I did try HTML5 as an alternative to flash when Youtube first started offering it, and it didn't offer any better performance.

With the various limitations Google started placing on the HTML5 player recently (requiring MSE, which is only supported by some browsers, and often in a half-baked way, etc), I'd stick with Flash for now, horrible as it is.

My T400 with p8600 and Radeon has problems with 1080p... when HTML5 is on (note: now it's turning on itself on half of videos, at least in Chrome), on Flash it's running OK. The same applies when I switch into integrated Intel GPU, so not GPU related problem.
That's not a CPU problem. It's an issue of parallel computing and facts that many alghoritms can't really benefit of having multiple independent threads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing

In my experience, using HTML5 instead of Flash is also slower and sometimes gives lower quiality video for the same resolution.

I use a Toughbook CF-51 daily with Win7 and 3GB RAM with a T7200 processor and I also
use HD videos as a stress test. I've found that IE11 usually works better than Chrome,
then I found that for some reason two versions of Flash often get loaded into Chrome
and they conflict you have to disable one for better performance.

I have several CF-51s and I recently bought one with a T2300 (1.66 GHz), 2GB and Intel
graphics, it even came with XP preloaded - I don't usually use XP but I just wanted this
for the motherboard. I ran XP for many years and this install seems to run very well,
better than most that I've seen.
The default browser is Firefox but I'm not sure if they added any plugins. 720p videos
easily play at 24-25 fps and 1080p play at 13 to 17 fps without stutter. Both play
without stutter but the audio and video do not have good sync. This is much slower
hardware than the OP yet I'm getting better frame rates. This laptop based on slow
hardware feels fast and I don't know why.
It also only has a 1024X768 display, perhaps fewer pixels to move around.

It is odd that some installs seem to run better than others.

Do people have specific videos that they use for testing?