I think his point was that he followed the instructions, and they failed. If he had been using Windows, he'd have followed the instructions and succeeded. This is the problem with Linux.
FWIW, I currently run Ubuntu on my laptop, and very much like it, Windows 7 on my work desktop, and my previous laptop ran OSX.
Is this the first time you've circumvented the package management system? If you have done it before, maybe that's the cause of the pain now? Just guessing, since these things usually work without any complaint for me.
It would be funny --- if it wasn't so tragic --- how much easier to use and manage free software is. Especially considering it's almost all just './configure ; make && make install' at the base level.
Not that you are one, but it's funny to watch Linux fanboys run into trouble with tasks that should be simple. It of course doesn't diminish their opinion of Linux being the greatest desktop by far.
And HD video still doesn't play smoothly and it's sometimes off-sync. My desktop (http://wiki.przemoc.net/about/my_hardware) surely isn't top-notch one, but outside of Flash world I can use it to watch 1080p50p video material, so something is wrong with Flash, and it's even worse in Linux department, unfortunately.
All of these things (1. + 2. + HD video) have been working for me for a long time. YouTube 1080p content works fine, though I kind of doubt it's using VDPAU, so it's bound to hit the CPU (4x 1.9GHz i5, hardly cutting edge) fairly hard. I'm using the 64bit flashplayer 11 from the sevenmachines ppa.
Are you using Chrome or Chromium? Chrome comes with its own flash version.
I use a beta version of Google Chrome (latest 15.0.874.81 beta) from official repo (deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main). I remember it was shipped with Flash, but it worked not as good as I would like it to, so I was using 64-bit betas (not great either, to be honest), IIRC by disabling Chrome's own Flash in about:plugins. Now looking there I see only one Flash plugin, which is the one installed in my system (Location: /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so). So even if Chrome's custom Flash is better, as you imply, dunno how to turn it on for a test ride now.
I didn't mean to imply that Chrome's custom Flash is better. I have no idea if it is since I run Firefox (typically) and Chromium (rarely). Like I said, I use the 64bit Flash player from the sevenmachines ppa (Ubuntu 11.04).
It's not easy getting a 747 rumble out of a laptop. You're lucky, the sound is usually tinny.
But there's a difference between "stable" and the situation where the cpu does the grunt work for the video instead of your gpu hardware. If Adobe and Apple can play nice maybe they can assist each other in getting the above changed in order to lessen the load on your cpu. It's more a "flash meets mac" thing, meaning both sides could do well to help resolve imho.
That's a shame - From 10,000 ft, it should be possible to make it as least as stable as WebGL in Chrome + Linux. That, from my limited sampling has been good enough for ongoing development, and maybe deployment with caveats.
To open standards? I uninstalled Flash a couple of weeks ago. That's the first step. Every few days I hit some video that I wish I could watch. Sometimes I reach for my iPad to watch it. You would think since I can watch it on my iPad, the site could detect that I don't have Flash and use another codec.
This boggles the mind. If they would just implement the renderer on top of OpenGL then they would get cross-platform hardware acceleration, even on mobile devices since a lot of them have OGL support these days. Considering that they still argue that they have a stable and optimized product, I'm forced to conclude that Adobe's staff are somewhat technically incompetent or that their Flash code base has a huge amount of technical debt.
Speaking as a Linux user, this is as significant as the first time I got sound to work. Flash on Linux (especially 64 bit) has been horribad. Hopefully it's less bad now.
Last I heard, the state of Linux drivers for hardware video decoding did not make it worth it to Adobe to support it. But that news is about 1.5 years old, so maybe it changed in the meantime.
Edit: Flash 11 youtube 360p is using 14% of my CPU. mplayer 480p uses 4%. shrug
Depends on the video, the CPU, the GPU, and how the video is displayed in Flash, but yes, it should work better, more often (though I'm not sure the 64-bitness is that relevant compared with the other stuff).
It is. The nspluginwrapper used to run the 32-bit Flash in a 64-bit Firefox (dunno if it also applies to other browsers) really slowed things down. I got much better performance running the 64-bit plugin, all other things -- including the Flash version number -- being equal.
Depends on your GPU and drivers. I don't remember the specifics, but I believe only (most?) the closed source drivers can support hardware acceleration.
I remember installing Flash on Debian about 4 years ago and wishing there was a 64 bit version so I didn't have to clutter up the system with another version of Firefox or the 32bit bridge libraries. Glad to see that this was resolved though.
I can't bear the pretentiousness of this video. The filler clips are so overdone, from the high-aperture clip of the can of Canada Dry Ice and whatever else it was by the guy's computer mouse to the nerf guns to the shot of a very typical Command Prompt screen in Matrix green. They're trying so hard.
- Firefox asked me whether I wanted to launch the 'apturl' tool. I accepted its suggestion.
- I got a dialog saying "This will enable the Canonical Partners repository". I'm pretty sure I already had it enabled, but sure, what the hell.
- I got the usual 'downloading updated package lists' dialog.
- I got an error dialog complaining that 'adobe-flashplugin' is a purely virtual package.
And that was that.
Guess it's back to trusty ol' tarballs.