Actionscript 3.0 :: Flash Video Playback - High Cpu Usage
May 12, 2009
I've been deploying video to the web via Flash for a couple years now and I was curious if anyone has experience with / knows if deploying video via a Flash Media Server or any other type of video centric server has a significant impact on performance playback? I've noticed lately that with YouTube content, often available in "HQ" or "HD" that the video playback suffers very marginally when switching to higher quality video. However, with video players I have developed, using HTTP progressive download, CPU usage often spikes during download of the video and decreases once it's been cached. I've also recently employed pseudo-streaming techniques with the help of XMOOV but this doesn't seem to have much of an effect on CPU usage during video download.
My video player was developed in AS3 and while it's not using a class based structure, it does follow general OOP techniques. Would a class based video player improve performance? Here is a link to a work in progress video player: [URL] Please try a couple videos and let me know if they play back smoothly and / or if you notice CPU spikes. Also note that the only video that makes use of XMOOV is the "Make a Wish" video as it's been injected with the necessary metadata.
As more and more FLV videos are moving to HD, I'm noticing high CPU usage and lots of dropped frames when playing FLV video in web browser with Flash 10. This is true even if the video isn't full screen. I've tried a variety of browsers (Firefox, I.E., Chrome) and the problem occurs on all of them so it's pretty clear it's a limitation in Flash.
Now my PC isn't high end (it has a Pentium M 1.86 GHz processor), but I can take those same FLV files and load them in something like Media Player Classic or Windows Media Player (when using ffdshow) and play the FLV files full screen with little or no drop in frames and an acceptable CPU rate.
This is especially annoying on sites like YouTube where I actually have to save the video and play it back in something other than Flash to have it play back at an acceptable rate. This doesn't work for other sites like Amazon.
Why is the CPU usage so high when decoding and displaying videos when compared to other media players?
I've hired a freelancer, to make a design for my flash app. And everything was fine, untill I saw this. It was an animated background. It has about 100 tweened movie clips, that do pretty much the same - simple rotation tween, but cpu usage on that background only reaches 17-20%. Its high for such a small effect. I've tried to optimize it - removing all code, and leving just timeline based tween, but that didn't solve my issue.[URL]
my flash has lots of images and dispaly objects. Hence it costs high cpu usages. after using my flash for an hour, it is dieing.I am trying to reduce it. I have some questions here:
1. I create an array, or string at frame 1 for example, when I go back to frame 1, should I create a new array, or a new string?? Or is it better to make it empty array(eg:[]) or empty string("")? which way it reduces cup uasge more?
2. does anyone know how to force the flash to do garbage collection??
3. any other possible reasons that cause high cpu usage?
I have helped write a program in AS3 that uses classes. We have 2 frames in our movieclip that consists of an ant moving. We have a class of ants and can create 15 instances of them and the program runs fine with the ants walking around looking for food and going back to a corner that is their nest and going back out again. The ants also respond to mouse movement if the mouse pointer is near an ant.
If we create more than 15 ants, then the program starts to slow down. If we have 30 ants on the screen, then there is noticable stuttering of the ant movement. The CPU usage on a P4 2.5Ghz Pentium is around 50%.
I am loading an XML file (fairly large document). It takes a high amount of my CPU(almost 100%). This prevents me from working on other applications. Also, it takes a lot of time to load.
I'm working on a new site and one of the things the client likes most is the idea of these gears that are constantly rotating on the screen. However, now that I have the mock-up design done, I'm noticing that the constant rotation requires a lot of CPU to maintain. Has anyone else experienced this and have you figured out a better method than the one I am using to rotate the movieclips?
All three of my family's computers have been experiencing problems with the firefox plugin container. The container spikes the CPU for long, long, periods of time slowing overall performance noticably.The only way to address the problem is to kill the Firefox plugin container.When I kill the plugin container it kills Adobe Flash.I've tried clearing the flash cache from the Adobe troubleshooting site, deleting all cache applications, and changing settings.My family plays Farmville which is always hanging and can only be fixed by restarting the computer. Okay, maybe farmville is a bad app.
There are 25 livestreams streaming to FMS4 server by fmle3.2,and client number is 20, (FMSCore.exe)CPU usage is about 20%~40%, how can i reduce cpu usage?
I've created a Flex website that plays a video using the Spark VideoDisplay component. When selected, the VideoDisplay loads in the PopUpManager.
This works fine in all the browsers, except Google Chrome take significantly longer to start playing, during which the CPU usage peaks, then goes back down once video starts playing.
I've traced the player states it goes through and they are as follows:
Loading ready (hangs for ages with high cpu) buffering playing (immediately after buffering, CPU usage goes down, video plays smoothly)
What could be causing this to temporarily hang for so much longer in Chrome? I thought I could expect the same functionality and behaviour throughout all the browsers, as Flash is simply a plugin that runs as a separate process?
Edit: It seems that it's the same in Opera too. Is there any commonality between the two that would explain this behaviour?
I'm trying to get a high quality video into a flash document. I would like it to stream the flv from the website it will be posted on.
The source file is a 640x480 quicktime file (H264 compression)however viewing it at 640x480, I notice that there is pixelation instead of a clean and crisp image, I look at the source, it's clean and crisp. how can I import a nice high quality video into flash without that nasty pixelation?
My problem is going to be hard to outlay in detail due to NDA's I am bound to, but the gist is this..I have a swf application the progressively streams content from a cdn edge server.I have built a video player class and instantiate a new one for each new piece of footage I find.Naturally this requires good memory management to ensure no leaks..... and herein lies the problem (surprise).
I have unregistered all my event listeners (not using weak at present) and nulled all objects from my media player object.I slice it from my list and call a destroy method that cleans up all objects setting references to null. Once this is done I call System.gc().My profiling tools are showing that my memory usage is continuing to increase linearly for each new video clip. The jump is about 5mb each time the approx size of each video file.
Is the built in "Video" component on the stage (players all share the same one) a built in type?
I am using Flash Professional 8 and Dreamweaver 8 to maintain a website. I have just started using flash to show video highlights from high school football games which I record. Using iMovie I export the video as quicktime file and then import to flash to convert to a flash video file to post on the web site. The video coming out of iMovie has very good contrast and the quicktime movie has the same good contrast. When looking at the file in Flash the contrast changes dramatically. I becomes washed out. I am using Max OX 10.6 operating system.
(1) An ec2 instance with an SWF on it - this SWF plays streaming video - i.e. is a video player like JWPlayer (2) A streaming video distribution set up via Cloudfront
If I stream the the video via RTMP from Cloudfront to the SWF (which is on ec2) - would I incur charges for data transfer into the server (i.e. for data being read by the SWF) and out of the server (i.e. for data being displayed by the SWF to the user) on account of streaming the video to users (assuming that data transfer into and out for the server is being charged for)?
My company sent me a video that they wanted us to post on the intranet. It's a simple powerpoint video with a narrator talking about some policy and benefit changes, etc.
I tried the exporting the video in both 720(width) and 1280 format, and found that when shown in fullscreen mode, the 1280 format was much easier to read than the 720, however, we didn't want to show it on the intranet page at full 1280 by default. So I modified the html and javascript that plays the movie so that it would show in 720 width on the page. The problem with resizing the 1280 video into a 720 space is that the video player bar (where the play, stop, volume controls are) becomes extremely small when I do this. Of course, this is because Flash generated the player with a toolbar optimized for 1280, so it's getting scaled down when I pack it into a smaller playing area.
Is there an solution to this that I haven't thought of? How can I generate this movie to get the better full screen appearance of the 1280 video, but also still show the video in a smaller 720 area when the user is not in full screen mode?
I want to add tracking to our Flash-based media player so that we can provide analytics that show what sections of videos are being watched (at the moment, we just register a view when a video starts playing)
For example, if a viewer watches the first 30 seconds of a video and then clicks away to something else, we want the data to reflect that. Likewise, if someone watches the first 10 seconds, then scrubs the timeline to the last minute of the video and watches that, we want to register viewing on the parts watched and not the middle section.
My first thought was to collect up the viewing data in the player and send it all to the server at the end of a viewing session. Unfortunately, Flash does not seem to have an event that you can hook into when a viewer clicks away from the page the movie is on (probably a good thing - it would be open to abuse)
So, it looks like we're going to have to make regular requests to the server as the video is playing. This is obviously going to lead to a high volume of requests when there are large numbers of simultaneous viewers.
The simple approach of dumping all these 'heartbeat' events from clients to a database feels like it will quickly become unmanageable so I'm wondering whether I should be taking an approach where viewing sessions are cached in memory and flushed to database when they become inactive (based on a timeout). That way, the data could be stored as time spans rather than individual heartbeats.
I have a video embedded in Flash as an FLV. I'm able to get the video to play through the way I want, but when the video plays through and ends, I want to have two options/"buttons" display that allow the user to either replay the video a la youtube, or link to another web page.
I know it must a very basic question but I can't seem to find any answers. I've included a screen capture of the end of the video.
I would like to be able to play my flash video on top of my website, and then disappear once its finished. Just like on the apple website, with the macbook air. This is probably very simple, but I am not sure what it is called!
Can anyone familiar with H.264 video recommend the 'best' compression settings to avoid the occasional visual 'glitch' one gets on playback using the flash video player?
I'm new at actionscript and not sure how to do this. I have a button named btnPlay and an flv video named valerie.flv. I would like it when the button is pressed, the flv video plays in the same flash file through the standard flv player.
Anyone know how to vary the playback speed of video in Flash? I'm looking to implement this in an educational website where users can slow down the video or breeze through it by changing the playback.
Here's an example of what I'm looking for: [URL].. Except that this is a PC application, .exe. I'm looking to vary speed WITHIN Flash. I think FLV is not an option because you can only jump from cue-point to cue-point. With F4V work? MP4?
I would like to play back 3 reasonably high res videos (On2 VP6-S) simultaneously in one Flash App (using flash.video, netstream and netconnect - code only). Unfortunately, when I do this, the video playback drops a lot of frames, however, CPU usage does not go much above 50% - spread over both cores. I'm using a Core2Duo. If I play the same 3 videos simultaneously in 3 separate flash apps (FP10), they play much better (and use close to 100% CPU). I even tried creating it as an AIR app with 3 separate windows (NativeWindow), but that made little difference. I have lodged this as a bug via the Flash Bug Reporting System [URL].
And yes, I do need to be doing something as crazy as this - it is for a pretty cool kiosk app, so I know what hardware will be used (and it has a good Graphics Card). One promising workaround appeared to be playing back a single NetStream in multiple Video instances, as it is NetStream that does the decoding, so I could decode once and present it in 3 places. Two of my video objects are actually the same flv (on different monitors), so there would be a 33% saving right there. If necessary, I could encode both flvs into a single 1920x1200 flv (I've checked - it would play back ok) and then use video.mask to show the relevant bits.
I understand Core Animation is Objective-C specific, and I am NOT familiar with developing AIR applications, but I was wondering if there was some how a way to trigger Core Animation through developing an AIR application? Don't AIR apps become native to the platform they're developed on?I just want to find a way to improve video playback through flash apps.
I am loading a h.264 mp4 video (quite big, 2048 x 768) into a flv player. When I test it inside flash (Ctrl + Enter), the video runs really smooth. However, when I publish my .exe (or even a .swf, although I need the .exe),
I am planning an implementation for a lecture capture solution for a local university. It is supposed to record all aspects of the lecture: the presenter will be recorded using videocamera + mic, his desktop activity is captured and optionally the whiteboard is captured as well (using Mimio). These input streams arrive (as video streams) to a computer that stores the recording on its harddisk. The file format for the recording should be able the hold multiple streams (Matroska for example).
The recording will be available from the uni's website. So at the client-side Flash seems a natural choice.
The player should display the different input sources into different rectangular regions of the player. One region displays the presenter, another region displays the desktop recording.
Is it possible to use a Matroska file as source for Flash streaming? If yes, how? If no, is there another container format more suitable for this? The FLV format can only hold one audio and one video file. Is it possible to have one Flash client receive multiple streams and diplay them in different regions of its own canvas?
