Poor Shockwave Flash performance on 770

[dsmudger]

Have many people tried playing flash animations yet?

The sort of stuff I'd love to be able to carry with me would be the likes of www.rathergood.com and http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/ (direct link to the flash if anyone wants to try loading it onto their 770: http://www.bish-bash-bosh.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/joel/flash/independent_woman.swf)

Would be really sweet for some laughs down the pub or whatever, except that the playback is really poor and the animations lose their punch (and hence the comedy is lost too :( ).

Oh, by the way, the 770 won't load the SWFs directly. You'll need to create yourself an HTML file that links to your anims. You don't need any of the header stuff, just one each of the following for each flash file. In my case they're in a subfolder on the MMC Mobile card called 'FlashFiles':

<A HREF="/media/mmc1/FlashFiles/kenya3.swf">Kenya</A>
<A HREF="/media/mmc1/FlashFiles/we_like_the_moon.swf">We Like the Moon</A>
<A HREF="/media/mmc1/FlashFiles/independent_woman.swf">Northern</A>

Does anyone have any insight as to whether this could be optimised in future? By recompiling the Flash Player (hmm.. it's closed source isn't it...) more optimally perhaps? ..or by using a slightly more 'lite' player...?

[Tainek]

i would say with that particular flash it is more likely due to the size(resolution) of the flash animation, the same reason as videos running slow, try running a smaller res flash file

[dsmudger]

I wasn't aware that flash files had a particular resolution - aren't they mainly a vector format (in that they scale to the size of the browser window in each case) Try the http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/ example in particular - that one has very little in the way of imported bitmaps.

More importantly though - the fact that all three of my examples are slow seems to suggest the 770 isn't up to scratch in this area, rather than it being a case of 'oh it's a one-off'.

Back to my original question - can Flash performance be improved somehow? and if so, how? (in the short-term and/or in future releases?)

[niko]

Hi dsmudger,


user:
Click and hold the flashmovie for the contextmenue. If not disabled you can decrease the quality there.

nokia:
Hopefully flash 8 will be supported one day. --> performance is fantastic.

programmer:
decrease frames/s, use keyframes instead of calculatet tweenings, write better code ...


regards,
Niko

[thigh bone]

I imagine the flash plugin will struggle to produce decent framerates on complex animations if they're running fullscreen, even if the plugin has been well-optimised. It's a big screen for a modest processor and version 6 of flash wasn't the most speedy even on windows!

You could try embedding the swf file in an html page and reducing the size by specifying a width and height parameter.
see:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_4150

[dsmudger]

user:
Click and hold the flashmovie for the contextmenue. If not disabled you can decrease the quality there.
Niko
Yeah, I figured that one out after a while - except there's a bug (discussed it in another thread I think).

The menu remembers your choice next time you open a swf, but the actual player does not - it goes back to high, even though the menu still says Medium for example.

I logged it in the Maemo Bugzilla but haven't heard back - I guess maybe they're concentrating on getting Flash8 onto the 770?
(lets hope so!)