538032 - fennec 1.0rc1 has very choppy playback of some flash content on n900

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[John Hein]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv: 1.9.2b6pre) Gecko 20091231 Firefox/3.6b6pre Fennec/1.0rc1

On the N900, I tried viewing the flash video at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/

It’s quite choppy – not surprisingly, especially if I have a lot of other apps open. But even if I close everything else, it still suffers from stops & starts. This is the case even if I pause and wait for the entire flash video to load up before starting up again.

Anyone know if this is a fennec issue or not enough horsepower on the n900 or both?

I tried a few youtube videos, and that seemed okay, but that is not a very scientific comparison.

Also the native n900 browser seems to be smooth, well if you don’t mind not seeing the video. Only audio. So that’s not a very good comparison either.

Generally, however, my browsing experience with fennec rc1 seems a good bit more sluggish and choppy than the native n900 browser.

Could just be a memory usage problem.  With Fennec up and an xterm /proc/swaps shows about 60 kBytes in use.  I think that may contribute to general sluggishness, but it also seems like the flash player choppiness is more regular than that (like a real bug as opposed to resource contention).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. On the N900, browse to the URL.
2. Start the flash video playing.
3. Notice choppy playback.
4. Pause the playback until flash fully loaded.
5. Resume playback & notice that it's still choppy (thus ruling out network slowness)

Comment 1

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Doug, from the steps to reproduce, I think we can classify this as a bug rather than an opinion.

Comment 2

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

The bug is real, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/ does not optimize its flash content.

See:  https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Fennec/Webpages

I wrote:

Developer note: many of these sites do not send optimized content to Fennec. For example, YouTube just recently switched to use the Sorenson codec which is much better on the n900. If you are testing, please be aware that frame rates may vary based on what sort of content the provider is sending down.

aakashd, we should move this over to website so that they can provide the right content here.

Comment 3

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Sounds good. I'm going to add caitlin as cc to this as well.