There is a problem playing flash video on a netbook.

Many Netbook users have been complaining of having a problem playing flash videos such as from Youtube or Hulu on the Atom processor. The same people can play the same videos fine in their normal media players or in VLC media player.

This requires a little bit of explanation. The big difference between playing flash video online and the same video in H264 stored locally is that for the online flash video the decoding and rendering is handled by the flash plug-in of your browser, while locally it is handled by your media player. You media player can be configured to take advantage of many OS specific GPU accelerated video frameworks that will take some of the burden of the video decoding from the processor. ( see this article for an in depth explanation of GPU assisted video decoding!)

The problem playing flash videos is that the flash plug-in can at best take advantage of the simplest form of acceleration: hardware stretching to fill the screen, and even that is a very recent development and not implemented in most flash based video players! This means that most of the actual decoding (and sometimes stretching) is performed by the CPU, and that places too much processing demands on it for the Atom processor. Providing better GPU acceleration for Video decoding in the flash plug-in would help, but will be difficult to implement because the frameworks are different on each OS and sometimes different for each GPU brand ( Nvidia and AMD do it differently). Supporting all this is what you pay the powerDVD developers for when you buy their product.

A solution to the problem playing flash videos is to first download the flash video locally from sites like Youtube and then play it in a dedicated media player that supports flash video such as VLC. The VLC media player will use some GPU acceleration to render the video and the it will play fine even on a netbook!

To download the video locally there are 2 convenient Firefox extensions you can use:

Flashgot allows you to download flash video with your usual download manager.

Video Downloadhelper allows you to queue the download in the extension itself and even to trans code the video if required. The trans-coding can be useful because flash video use the H264 codec that may be too much for the old 7 inch EEEPC 600 MHz processor.

Now these extensions don't support all flash sites, but for Youtube at least they offers a workable solution to the problem playing flash videos on a netbook.

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