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!

Installing Flash & Java on Firefox & Chromium browsers

1. Install Flash & Java
2. Symlink executables to browser plugin folder

Java

sudo ln -s  JAVA_PLUGIN_PATH BROWSER_PLUGIN_PATH

Flash

sudo ln -s FLASH_PLUGIN_PATH BROWSER_PLUGIN_PATH

To find JAVA_PLUGIN_PATH

locate libnpjp2.so
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

To find FLASH_PLUGIN_PATH

locate libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

And BROWSER_PLUGIN_PATH is

# Firefox 
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugin/

# Chromium 
/usr/lib/chromium/plugin/

#Google-Chrome 
/opt/google/chrome/plugin/

NOTE: symlinks must be updated after every java upgrade