Pale Moon forum

On the Puppy Linux forum there has been some disappointment about performance (or lack thereof) on Youtube. It's in the Pale Moon thread starting at http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... &start=646 During the beta I mentioned that my Youtube performance suffered due to lack of hardware acceleration. This regression is most noticable on older machines, e.g. I've had to switch from my 10-year-old Core2 Duo to a newer Ivybridge desktop machine to get back to 1080p fullscreen on Youtube.

I go 1080p because my monitor is 1920x1080. 4k monitors and videos are slowly becoming a thing now. Even newer machines are going to need hardware acceleration to play back 4K.

I think there are some problems with Linux in general, I have read:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2017
I read somewhere else Nvidia are not releasing the 3D elements as Linux lacks GPU thermal management, it only monitors CPU temperatures. So if the GPU was heavily loaded the relevant fan would not turn on unless the BIOS intervened.

Since PM is now using libavcodec for playback, maybe there would be some sort of flag to pass to it to enable whatever sort of acceleration it supports, such as va-api for my Intel integrated GPU.

To those disappointed with video playback performance when using the 32-bit version of Pale Moon 28, can you please test and see if performance is any better with the media.ffvpx.enabled pref set to false?

trava90 wrote:when using the 32-bit version of Pale Moon 28, can you please test and see if performance is any better with the media.ffvpx.enabled pref set to false?

Edit: Just noticed this was the Linux-subforum.. well, maybe it's somewhat relevant anyway.. maybe..

Disclaimer: NoScript-user.

For me, (probably) yes.

Win7 SP1 x64, AMD APU (HD6320), v27.* (32bit) had some problems for me, couldn't play videos/gifs, v28 (32bit) fixed that, media.ffvpx.enabled -> false improves that somewhat. My old'n'weak laptop still can't play 720p60 (tested on YT), but I noticed less frequent/smaller "stops/jumps", which should mean improved performance (unless confirmation bias..). 720p30 was and is fine, so can't really test performance with a quick test on that.

Will see today if the "overall YT experience" is better for me, but at the very least it shouldn't be worse.

Thanks, but media.ffvpx.enabled being false is not likely to make much of a difference (if any) on Windows.

trava90 wrote:To those disappointed with video playback performance when using the 32-bit version of Pale Moon 28, can you please test and see if performance is any better with the media.ffvpx.enabled pref set to false?

Definite improvement. My "benchmark" is the Youtube roller-coaster video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dC6uJDNf64 On my 10-year old Core2 with 32-bit Gentoo and a 1920x1080 monitor

• PM 27.9.4 standard build handles 720p fullscreen
• PM 27.9.4 "Gentoo Ricer" build handles 1080p fullscreen
• PM 28.0.0 standard mode handles 480p fullscreen
• PM 28.0.0 ( media.ffvpx.enabled ==> false ) handles 720p fullscreen

Chromium community managed to enable video hardware acceleration almost for a year. It seems Linux web browsing scene is getting more appealing for notebook users and older PC hardware owners.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/

What exactly does that setting do? Does it have libavcodec use some faster built-in vp8 and vp9 decoder instead of libvpx?

I was originally going to suggest allowing Steve and other official builds to set media.ffvpx.enabled ==> false in 32-bit linux builds. Maybe a better idea would be to simply make it the default for all 32-bit-linux builds. At least until such time as internal hardware acceleration is enabled in UXP.

stevepusser wrote:What exactly does that setting do? Does it have libavcodec use some faster built-in vp8 and vp9 decoder instead of libvpx?

It disables the version of ffvpx that ships in our tree (currently 3.4) and falls back to the system installed FFmpeg packages instead (very similar to what v27 did) and then falls back to libvpx as a last resort if the required FFmpeg packages can't be found.

One question: why would this only apply to 32-bit Pale Moon?

Our bundled FFmpeg code is not as optimized when building 32-bit Linux as it is when building 64-bit. I'm investigating why this is and if it can be optimized more akin to 64-bit builds (or if we should just disable it for 32-bit Linux builds).