Friday, June 18, 2010

Use mplayer to play stuttering web flash videos on browsers (high CPU load)

Playing web flash videos on my Ubuntu Firefox can yield super high CPU load as flash is poorly supported on Linux. Couple that with a sub-optimal Firefox Flashplayer plugin which causes CPU load to spike up to almost 100% and this makes the video stutter like mad.

One solution is to start and pause the video to initiate caching and use mplayer to play the cached flash video instead.


mplayer /tmp/Flash*

Now it plays smooth. Fullscreen? No problem. Just toggle "F" on your keyboard!

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