Despite being a technology enthusiast, I am also a very late adopter when it comes to purchasing new electronics. Being a university student, I tend to think twice before dropping hundreds of dollars on the latest offerings from manufacturers such as Dell and Apple. Additionally, my nature compels me to get the most use out of my electronics before replacing them with later and greater models.  As a result, one of my most used machines to this day is an old Pentium 4 2.93GHz desktop with a PCI Nvidia 8400gs GPU. Coexisting in a world with quad core central processors and 3,200 stream processing GPUs, the machine still serves me well as a day to day internet surfing and programming center.

In spite of all the values tasks the computer is still capable of performing, one major setback has been with regards to online multimedia streaming using Adobe’s Flash player. Although Flash 10.1 boasts features such as hardware acceleration in order to use the dedicated power of the GPU, I have found playback to be continuously choppy while viewing videos in full screen mode. To give some statistics, at 720p resolution Flash 10.1 drops over 1000 frames and plays at just 9 frames per second. On the other hand, viewing the same file on a dedicated player such as Media Player classic reveals smooth playback with a FPS of over 25.8. After endlessly searching for flash alternatives, I managed to settle for the solution discussed below. The following proof of concept currently only functions with Youtube and may require the installation of additional video codecs.

Setting up the Flash replacement:

1. If you are using Firefox, the first thing you need to do is install the greasemonkey extension. I would recommend using Firefox instead of Chrome or Opera due to compatibility reasons.
2. Once greasemonkey is installed, go to Userscripts and download Youtube Without Flash Auto. This is the script that does all the flash replacement for us. Install the script and ensure that grasemonkey is enabled by checking the monkey icon on the bottom right of Firefox.
3. Go over to Youtube and click on a random video. Underneath the video, you should see a link called, “Preferences.” Click the link.
4. Ensure that Video Url is set to get_video and Generic player MIME is set to Application/x-mplayer2. Click save to store the settings.
5. When you refresh the page, your default media player should load up instead of Flash.  If the video does not start playing after clicking the play button, you may need to download codecs as discussed below.

Installing the Codec:

On my computer, I used the CoreAVC video codec for it’s ability to use Nvidia CUDA acceleration. An alternative to CoreAVC is the Combined Community Codec Pack which is absolutely free and works well. After installing the 2009 package, restart your computer and see if Youtube displays a video.

Performance Difference:

The Youtube video used to test the performance of each player was, Miniature City (720p HD). Needless to say, Flash performance was terrible, dropping over 1200 frames and running at just 10.78 fps while in full screen mode. I also noticed that GPU usage was at 0% throughout the Flash test regardless of whether hardware acceleration under settings was marked or unmarked. So far I have yet to hear from Adobe regarding this issue…