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A
Anonymous
December 5, 2013
Question

HBOgo video terrible playback but Flash works everywhere else

  • December 5, 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 3642 views

I've been having this problem for a really long time, many months.  I begin watching anything on HBOgo.com, playback defaults to a medium resolution, plays fine for a few seconds, then when it detects my bandwidth, kicks it up to maximum resolution.  The video becomes choppy with framerates around 2 to 5 fps (if I'm lucky), the CPU is pinned at 100%, and audio is equally choppy (not to mention annoying as....).

Computer:  HP Pavilion DV7 laptop with NVIDIA graphics 9600 GT

OS:  Vista 64

Flash Player Version:  11,9,900,152

I've applied every update I can think of:

-  All the Windows updates, latest service pack, all security updates, basically let Windows Update do its thing and then double checked its work to verify it was up to date.

-  Lastest drivers for video from NVIDIA

-  All three browsers up to date:

   (1) Firefox  (preferred browser)  (2) Chrome  (3) IE  (which I use as last resort)

- Also, the Flash plugins for each browser, which happens automatically anyway once you have the plugin installed and update a browser

- Updated all the HP firmware, for BIOS and every hardware subcomponent for which and update could be found.

- I've even created new Windows User profiles just to watch a single video after reinstalling each browser so there's no chance of cache corruption or the like.

I watched a youtube video just now at 1920 resolution in which "stats for nerds" says about 25 fps and very few dropped frames.  Here's the video, if anyone cares:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZZysNq1No

Watching CPU for that showed it hovering between 40 and 50 percent.  It said it wasn't using hardware acceleration either, which I also find annoying, but that seems like nit picking when it plays smoothly.

So, I'd say that's an example of HD video playing well with Flash, right?  Of course.

Second example, Flash with Hulu.  Same thing, any and all videos play well all the time, even at best resolutions.

So, that tells me that my computer can play Flash videos at high resolution, no problem.

Until I goto HBOgo.com, that is.

Right clicking on the video shows me:

     Stage Video enabled in OSMF: yes

     Stage Video is supported

     Stage Video is not being used...

If I watch the video (nearly unbearable), I will see that it does a good job of maintaining a buffer (60s using about 400Mb), but the frame rate is usually less than 4 and dropped frames just climb into the thousands while my CPU shows nearly always 100% and never less than 96%.  After doing spacebar-pause it will still spit out a few frames and then a second or three later acknowledge my pause request by showing the pause icon on screen, as if it was having a really difficult time processing every frame.

Flash works everywhere except on HBOgo.com, where it make me want to blow up the computer.  What am I forgetting to check?  Please help.

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2 replies

A
Anonymous
December 7, 2013

I found something else, a discrepency between the versions of DirectX which are supposedly supported by my computer.

Running "dxdiag" from the command line brings up a window which tells me that:

     DirectX Version: DirectX 11

This is the DirectX Diagnostic Tool which I found referenced on the Microsoft Site.

In contrast, I have this application called Speccy (Piriform Speccy) which, under the Graphics option, tells me that for my NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT:

     DirectX Support          10.0

Could this apparent disagreement lead to any issues affecting Flash Video Players?  Or is it irrelevant since Flash says that hardware acceleration should work the same for all versions after Flash 9?

A
Anonymous
December 6, 2013

I thought of something else:  Tracert always times out around the 11th hop.  I also found an online tracert application on the opposite side of the country that reliably times out as it approaches the same server.  I even tried resetting the time out to something ridiculous like 100,000 ms and it times out still.

I realize this doesn't mean much, since unicast routing is asynchronous (so the path from hbogo to me is probably different than from me to them), I might be getting hot-potatoed, and the protocol on which tracert relies combined with the low importance of its packet's information means that its most likely to be tossed out by a server (giving me the fasle positive that packet loss derives from a server which doesn't feel like responding to tracert requests).

Despite the fact that tracert is diagnostically weak, is there any way that low-level stuff like latency could affect how Flash decodes the video?  The buffer seems full everytime I check it, so I don't know how it could, but then again, I don't know much about networking in the first place.

Oh, I'm in Philadelphia,  the online tracert utility I think was in California, and I'm pretty sure the HBOgo video server is somewhere near Texas.

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