What's the bottleneck here (CPU usage)

[Rocket J Squirrel]

I've resurrected an old computer and installed 12.04 on it, in hopes of using it to watch streaming videos with it.

• Celeron cpu running at 2.6GHz,
• 1MB of RAM, [Edit: 1GB of RAM]
• 82865G integrated graphics controller,
• the display is my HD TV and Ubuntu is driving it at 1920x1080 through the VGA port (I'm using a VGA > HDMI adaptor)

It's choking on streaming videos, such as YouTube and national news shows.

Even with the video in small-screen mode, htop reports the CPU running at 100%. In full screen mode, forget it -- too stuttery to watch.

I tried FireFox and Chrome and get the same results.

With the video paused I see 15% cpu usage. Memory usage is 450MB out of the available 1GB, so I don't think it's disk swapping causing the problem.

Do I need a faster motherboard to watch full-screen videos?

[idoitprone]

I've resurrected an old computer and installed 12.04 on it, in hopes of using it to watch streaming videos with it.

• Celeron cpu running at 2.6GHz,
• 1MB of RAM,
• 82865G integrated graphics controller,
• the display is my HD TV and Ubuntu is driving it at 1920x1080 through the VGA port (I'm using a VGA > HDMI adaptor)

It's choking on streaming videos, such as YouTube and national news shows.

Even with the video in small-screen mode, htop reports the CPU running at 100%. In full screen mode, forget it -- too stuttery to watch.

I tried FireFox and Chrome and get the same results.

With the video paused I see 15% cpu usage. Memory usage is 450MB out of the available 1GB, so I don't think it's disk swapping causing the problem.

Do I need a faster motherboard to watch full-screen videos?

No, you need a faster processor to run full-screen videos.
You cpu is the bottleneck. Flash is cpu hungry if you do not have a proper video card to offload the work. Since your integrated card is not worth mentioning, your cpu have to do all the work

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

if you did not make a typo in your ram info it would be the cpu
this may help you http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2078303 it will allw you to play flash videos outside of flash and get hardware acceleration

[mayagrafix]

My guess is the driver for the Intel 82865G integrated graphics controller. The stock drivers included in 12.10 are pretty good right out of the box, but may need some tweaking for ur particular graphics controller since it is 7 or 8 years old. It would be nice if you could temporarily install a AGP video card and see if that solves the problem.

Also, you list 1 meg of RAM in the specs, but later you mention 1 gig. The later is good enough, the former is obviously not enough.

Instead of a newer mobo (which entails new CPU and RAM) try a SSD (solid state drive).

Good luck!

[Rocket J Squirrel]

Oops -- 1GB of RAM.

[Rocket J Squirrel]

My guess is the driver for the Intel 82865G integrated graphics controller. The stock drivers included in 12.10 are pretty good right out of the box, but may need some tweaking for ur particular graphics controller since it is 7 or 8 years old.

Er....

It would be nice if you could temporarily install a AGP video card and see if that solves the problem.

The mobo only has PCI slots.

Also, you list 1 meg of RAM in the specs, but later you mention 1 gig. The later is good enough, the former is obviously not enough.

Yeah, sorry -- 1GB is the correct answer. Thanks, KS.

pqwoerituytrueiwoq's suggestion -- using a script to open the Flash video in another player, sounds a bit tweaky for the Missus to use.

I think I'd rather just hand this box over to someone in the office to use as a generic workstation, and concentrate on building one that can do a better job. Can someone point me to minmum specs needed for Flash videos and maybe a mobo with hdmi?

[TenPlus1]

Hold on, I have a Compaq m2000 laptop with Intel 82852 graphics (older than yours) and a 1.5ghz Celeron processor (half the speed or yours) and 1gb memory... From that I can play youtube videos smoothly and in full screen if need be...

What version of Ubuntu do you have installed, have you tried Lubuntu 12.10 ? and check out Google Chrome as your browser since it uses PepperFlash 11.3+ instead of the old 11.2 flash plugin most linux users are stuck with through the software centre...

https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/chrome/browser/

[Rocket J Squirrel]

Thanks, TenPlus1

Hold on, I have a Compaq m2000 laptop with Intel 82852 graphics (older than yours) and a 1.5ghz Celeron processor (half the speed or yours) and 1gb memory... From that I can play youtube videos smoothly and in full screen if need be...

I wish it were so here!

What version of Ubuntu do you have installed, have you tried Lubuntu 12.10 ? and check out Google Chrome as your browser since it uses PepperFlash 11.3+ instead of the old 11.2 flash plugin most linux users are stuck with through the software centre...

Well, as I mentioned in my OP, I'm running 12.04, and have tried this with both FireFox and Chrome.

Lubuntu -- what will that buy me?

Anyone got a suggestion for an hdmi mobo & cpu and the other specs I need to gut this thing and rebuild it?

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

I will suggest using dvi to hdmi and analog audio, it is much less headache to get working, in my exp HDMI audio is nothing but trouble

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...=Combo.1100870 - cpu+mobo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231394 - ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812117641 - hdmi to dvi cable
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16882850012 - 3.5mm analog audio cable
just use the 1st hdmi plug on the tv and the audio plug next to the vga plug

if you are using ubuntu (unity) try xubuntu (xfce) or lubuntu (lxde)

btw with that script you just make a luncher in the panel to click after pausing the video (if you-tube change the quality setting), have it run video smplayer '-fullscreen -close-at-end' for example

[Rocket J Squirrel]

Thank you, pqwoerituytrueiwoq

I appreciate that you took the time to point me to some hardware. I have a follow-up question, if you don't mind.

I popped into my wife's office to see how it handles the videos. Hers is the fastest machine we have: it has a Pentium dual-core E5500 processor running at 2.8GHz and is running Windows 7. [Edit: video is reported to be an Intel G45/G43 Express chipset.]

With a generic YouTube music video, the cpu was loafing at 35% usage, even in full-screen. But when I took a look at one of the American football sports feeds that I like to watch it was pegging at 100% most of the time. So her machine isn't powerful enough for those feeds.

I know that comparing things like this under different operating systems may not be possible, but do you think that the mobo you suggest (which uses a Pentium G630 Sandy Bridge 2.7GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor and Intel HD Graphics BX80623G630) would do much better?