Pepperflash working well for anyone?

Message

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Fri Oct 24, 2014 7:49 pm

Has anyone had good luck with Pepperflash compatibility day-to-day?

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Sat Oct 25, 2014 8:01 pm

sure, using it on a daily basis with chromium and www-plugins/chrome-binary-plugins

anything specific you want to know ?

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Mon Oct 27, 2014 9:26 pm

How often do you run into compatibility problems with it?

szczerb · Post by **szczerb** » Mon Oct 27, 2014 9:31 pm

For me it actually works better than the nsplugin with firefox.

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Mon Oct 27, 2014 9:33 pm

Awesome, just what I was hoping to hear. Any tips for making the switch? I should be able to Google up a guide.

Can pepperflash be accelerated with VDPAU?

Blaine · Post by **Blaine** » Mon Oct 27, 2014 10:58 pm

It works very well. Actually, it works a lot better than the NPAPI plug-in. Small wonder, as it is a way newer version of flash. Hardware acceleration works, but can introduce instability. YMMV.

The only caveat I am aware of, is that PPAPI (pepper) flash does not support Digital Restriction Management (DRM). In case you want to play any copyright-"protected" content (eg. Amazon Prime), you will have to use the NPAPI plugin (in eg. Firefox, as chrome does not support NPAPI anymore).

Adjusting your package.keywords:

Code: Select all

echo "www-plugins/chrome-binary-plugins:stable" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

and

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emerge -av chromium chrome-binary-plugins

should do the trick.

Best

djdunn · Post by **djdunn** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:26 am

better than nsplugins for me too.

Navar · Post by **Navar** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:30 am

Been using it fine since Adobe abandoned Linux updates quite awhile go and completely removed my NPAPI plugin use.

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:50 pm

Thanks for the info, setup was too easy.

Hardware acceleration works

I get perfect 1080p fullscreen playback on youtube in Firefox but very bad performance in Chrome. chrome://gpu verifies that hardware acceleration is enabled there. Is everyone's GPU performance better in Firefox?

The only caveat I am aware of, is that PPAPI (pepper) flash does not support Digital Restriction Management (DRM). In case you want to play any copyright-"protected" content (eg. Amazon Prime), you will have to use the NPAPI plugin.

In Firefox, will Linux play DRM stuff like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu these days?

EDIT: It turns out you have to jump through some compile-time hoops to get acceleration working:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki ... ideoDecode

So I suppose it can't be made to work in google-chrome at all.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=527232

Blaine · Post by **Blaine** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:48 pm

grant123 wrote:In Firefox, will Linux play DRM stuff like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu these days?

Adobe's linux support is so recent, it still demands HAL. Therefore, you have to

Code: Select all

emerge -av media-libs/hal-flash

in order to play restricted flash content. At least it works for Amazon Prime and HBOGo. I do not know about Hulu.
AFAIK, Netflix is supposed to work on chrome with their HTML5 player.

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:01 pm

Wow another nice tip, thanks again. I thought that kind of stuff on Linux was the impossible dream.

Blaine · Post by **Blaine** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:08 pm

You are welcome.

By the way, as I already mentioned further up, this will only work with Netscape Flash. Pepperflash seems not have any DRM capabilities.

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:24 pm

So Adobe Flash and HTML5 yes, Pepperflash no?

Blaine · Post by **Blaine** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:34 pm

Just to rule out any misunderstandings:

-Adobe Flash (NPAPI in eg. Firefox) will play protected flash. -> This I know from experience with HBOGo and Amazon Prime.
-Adobe Flash (PPAPI, aka pepperflash in Chrome and Chromium) works great for unprotected flash content, but will refuse to display protected content.

-Chrome (I do not know about Chromium) is said to play protected HTML5, eg Netflix. -> This I read in the news.

grant123 · Post by **grant123** » Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:06 am

Got it. Hopefully the Gentoo devs come through with an acceleration USE flag for chromium so I can watch Netflix.

Navar · Post by **Navar** » Mon Nov 03, 2014 3:59 am

grant123 wrote:I get perfect 1080p fullscreen playback on youtube in Firefox but very bad performance in Chrome. chrome://gpu verifies that hardware acceleration is enabled there. Is everyone's GPU performance better in Firefox?

I don't use flash anywhere outside of Chrome's sandboxing. That said, my i5 w/ ATI 7850 GPU doesn't bat an eyelash at 1080p video playback on youtube (the GPU isn't strained and the CPU use is minimal). Basically if you have newer hardware, no problem. However on older Google 'unsupported' systems like an older Intel T2500 w/ NVidia 7900 GS it seems to play let's bounce the hell out of those CPU cores (even when I have a forced ignore GPU blacklist to chrome). So GPU acceleration is iffy at best (yet see below). I just stick with 720p there and call it a day so I don't have to run fans on high or download an mp4 H.264 variant and let mplayer play it properly for 1080 without the high overhead of browser plugin or excessively heating up the CPU. The sad part is, silverlight accelerated playback in Windows (Netflix) will work just dandy. I haven't kept up with Netflix's playback status (via Wine or otherwise) in awhile, perhaps it has improved greatly. Before it was pretty problematic.

But most WebGL accelerated stuff still works fairly good in chrome on the lesser laptop system, go figure.

SDNick484 · Post by **SDNick484** » Fri Nov 07, 2014 7:22 pm

grant123 wrote:Got it. Hopefully the Gentoo devs come through with an acceleration USE flag for chromium so I can watch Netflix.

I've had luck with Netflix in Gentoo using Pipelight. It's not the most elegant solution, but it works. Although personally, I find I more often then not watch Netflix (& Amazon Prime) on my TV using the myriad of devices that support it natively and are already attached to my TV (i.e. Tivo, game consoles, etc.).