video stutter

[paul1149]

I just had a prospective customer ask about video freezing on a unit I have for sale. I ran the unit to find out, and to my surprise video performance in Slimjet was not good at all. There wasn't freezing, but there was plenty of stuttering. CPU hovered resiliently around 100%, with just one tab open.

At first I chalked it up to windows updating and panda AV working in the background, which indeed were factors. But even after they calmed down the poor performance continued. Switching to the flash player did not help.

So I fired up IE to compare, and was astounded by the difference. IE ran the video much smoother and clearer.

This is a netbook with an Intel Atom 1.66ghz hyperthreaded single core CPU and 2GB of DDR2 RAM, running Win7 x86.

I also have someone returning a netbook, complaining about speed. There may well be other factors at play there, but at this point I am concerned.

[dev]

yeah I've switched back to firefox 33 with fxchrome theme till slimjet updates considerably more. There are just too many small niggles with slimjet, lack of media support, poor download manager etc. Fed up of browsing the web and having to switch browser just to watch a embedded video because slimjet doesn't support it.

[jeffhere]

an atom 1.66...what from what I recall, they were dogs 5 years ago even with XP! You are not doing customers justice with that POS CPU!!! Sorry, I do same as we discussed and never would sell that cpu..although when I advertise dog laptops (even a single core dothan or banias) I will state for simple surfing and email use only....keep expectations low and they still sell. Glad it runs better with IE then....stick with what works!

[paul1149]

They are netbooks, so expectations shouldn't be sky high, but I generally have little problem with performance on anything 1.6ghz/single core, or greater. I used to load Opera 12.16/17 on, which was pretty good on resources if the tab count was kept low. But it's time to migrate away from the discontinued model.

I just ran tests, and the problem seems to be Blink-wide. The new Opera does the same thing. Firefox does also. 100% CPU when playing one video.

The problem might be exacerbated due to the OS being Home Premium rather than Starter. But then the netbook is upgraded to 2GB RAM.

[paul1149]

The original system is gone now, so I can't follow up on it. But I just tried on another Atom 1.6ghz unit, and found that video buffering apparently is part of the problem. While IE still has better CPU usage numbers, both it and SJ after a while drop down, as buffering is achieved. Whereas IE will drop down to the 30% range, SJ will drop down to about 50%. While neither is great, both are acceptable.

IMO, anything that can be done to improve resource usage is welcome. Back in the old days, Opera used to fit that niche, but then it took a radical turn in the other direction. With all the multimedia being used today, I suppose a lot of that is unavoidable.

[dev]

The original system is gone now, so I can't follow up on it. But I just tried on another Atom 1.6ghz unit, and found that video buffering apparently is part of the problem. While IE still has better CPU usage numbers, both it and SJ after a while drop down, as buffering is achieved. Whereas IE will drop down to the 30% range, SJ will drop down to about 50%. While neither is great, both are acceptable.

IMO, anything that can be done to improve resource usage is welcome. Back in the old days, Opera used to fit that niche, but then it took a radical turn in the other direction. With all the multimedia being used today, I suppose a lot of that is unavoidable.

Have you tried Safari? Always found it to be a fairly lightweight browser on lower end systems.

[paul1149]

I did a long time ago, and found no reason to hold onto it. But I'll keep it in mind regarding resource usage. Thanks.

[oftentired]

just to remind you that Slimjet is still in Beta release....

[dev]

just to remind you that Slimjet is still in Beta release....

Someone needs to crack the whip then

[paul1149]

Then, in your opinion, we should not file bug reports?