How to optimize Pipelight for slow cpu's?

The cpuinfo line actually read

egrep '^cpu (family|MHz)' /proc/cpuinfo

obviously

Hi,

I would recommend to check especially the following things:

* Is the GPU good enough to support GPU acceleration? You should first check what the default configuration for your GPU is. Just run your browser from a terminal, and you should see a message, if GPU acceleration was enabled, when you visit any Silverlight page.

To force GPU acceleration just run your browser from a terminal with:
PIPELIGHT_GPUACCELERATION=1 firefox
(or any other browser), and again verify on the terminal output, that it was really enabled.

Based on the result (for example if it doesn't work anymore), it could mean that the graphic card is not good enough or that the installed drivers are just too old. If you get it working with GPU acceleration enabled, this should already result in a big performance improvement.

* Are you using pulseaudio or alsa? At first it might sound unrelated, but as Silverlight synchronizes both the audio and video speed, both have a very big impact on each other. If you have multiple ALSA subdevices or its sufficient that you have only one audio output at a specific time you can theoretically disable pulseaudio (you can read more about this here: http://fds-team.de/cms/articles/2013-05/activating-sound-hardware-mixing-on-ubuntu.html ). Wine also has some settings related to that, you can take a look at the following FAQ how to force the ALSA sound backend in wine: https://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight/+faq/2444

* Does the streaming page you want to use allow to select the quality and/or bandwidth? Please note that the video decoding is done completely on the CPU, also when GPU accelerated rendering is used. As a workaround just selecting a lower quality level could probably work, such that the CPU is still capable of decoding the video frames in realtime.

* We also did some performance improvements for the next pipelight version, which will be released soon. On the hardware I used for testing the effect isn't that big, but probably it helps a bit more in your case. The easiest way is just to wait for the next release, except you're a bit experienced with compiling software and want to try it out immediately.

Please report back if some of the ideas above help a bit - but if this is not the case, there is unfortunately not that much left we can do to help you :/ Pipelight just runs the original version of Silverlight in an unmodified form, and we have no influence on how efficient their algorithms are. Pipelight itself is basically just responsible for redirecting calls, and after the next release there isn't that much left to speed up.

Sebastian