Pipelight Netflix frame dropping and laggy

Hi,

as you have an AMD graphic card GPU acceleration isn't enabled by default for Pipelight (because some other people experienced problems with it) - nevertheless I don't think that this is the main problem. Normally it should work well even without GPU acceleration, at least if the plugin window isn't too big.

If you have already modified any Pipelight config files I would recommend to undo these settings before proceeding with some tests (If not you can skip over these steps).

If you created for example a config file in ~/.config/, then just delete it:
rm ~/.config/pipelight-silverlight

Moreover I would also suggest to wipe the whole wine-pipelight wine prefix to be sure that everything is in the default configuration. Close all your browser windows, and then run:
rm -rf ~/.wine-pipelight

When you start the browser again everything should be reinstalled automatically.

Afterwards try the following ideas:

#0) While watching a movie please take a look at the CPU usage, for example with the program "htop":

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install htop
htop

If the CPU usage is 100% while watching a movie: Your computer is relatively low powered. Its difficult to say what the minimum system requirements are exactly (because they're probably a bit higher than on Windows), so I cannot guarantee that smooth playback is possible at all. Nevertheless I would recommend to continue to try out also all the ideas below before giving up. ;-)

#1 ) The most common issue for performance problems is pulseaudio (which unfortunately has a lot of bugs). Silverlight synchronizes both audio and video speed, so all kind of weird audio problems also have an influence on the video playback. In some cases it helps to restart pulseaudio and it immediately works afterwards. This is the first thing I would suggest to do:

pulseaudio -k

Then refresh the page and test again. It might be necessary to repeat this command after every reboot or in some cases even after a few hours.

#2 ) If this doesn't help please run:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-pipelight WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-compholio/bin/winecfg

then select the audio tab, and try to adjust the settings there. There is also a "play sound" button, but this only helps to find the right settings if there is a big difference between all the individual configurations. If this doesn't help make sure to reset the original configuration (for example by closing the browser again, and then deleting the wine-pipelight prefix one more time).

#3 ) If none of the settings turns out to work well enough: Close all browser windows, then start it from a terminal with:

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 firefox

or

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 chromium-browser

(depending on what you use). Does this improve the performance?

#4) We ship pipelight with winepulse support, which means that wine directly uses pulseaudio in the default configuration. The alternative method would be to let wine use the winealsa driver (which is then translated again to pulseaudio in some other library). In theory both methods should work equally well, but we also got some other reports that for some users only one of both methods works well. To switch to winealsa you can use the following commands:

wget -O ~/.wine-pipelight/winetricks http://winetricks.org/winetricks
chmod +x ~/.wine-pipelight/winetricks
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-pipelight WINE=/opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine WINEARCH=win32 ~/.wine-pipelight/winetricks

Then choose: "Select the default wineprefix" -> "Change Wine settings" -> "sound=alsa"

Afterwards restart the browser and test again. If it still doesn't work it can also make sense to look again at the wine configuration (which probably now shows different settings because of the different backend):

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-pipelight WINEARCH=win32 /opt/wine-compholio/bin/winecfg

If this method also doens't work: The easiest way to switch back to winepulse (the default settings) is to clear wine prefix one more time when the browser is closed.

Please report back if any of these ideas helps.

Regards,
Sebastian

Thank you for your answer! Very quick and easy to understand. Here are my results so far:

Did reinstall then looked at CPU usage. Unfortunately it's running anywhere from 92-98.1%, so that probably explains it, but I'll try the rest of your ideas as well.

#1 - Killing Pulseaudio seemed to actually improve the playback slightly, however it is still un-watch-able.

#2 - Under the "audio" tab, all of my "default" options are either (System Default) or Pulseaudio. They are all set on (System Default). Am I just supposed to switch between the two options? I don't know how else to mess with those settings. When I tried clicking "test sound" I got the following error:
err:ole:CoInitializeEx Attempt to change threading model of this apartment from multi-threaded to apartment threaded

Hi,

we do not support video acceleration for AMD graphic cards yet as it seems to be random whether it works and this may result in a bad performance. You can try to force video acceleration and check whether it works for you.

If you are using the open source driver, make sure that you have the 32 bit drivers installed:
sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri:i386

Now close all your browser windows and start your browser from a terminal:
PIPELIGHT_GPUACCELERATION=1 firefox

(Replace firefox with chromium / google-chrome depending on the browser you are using)
If you only see a black area or a disturbed image, you can also try to replace the 1 with a 2 which will use a slightly less efficient way to render the frames, but is more likely to work. This may fix your problem or does not work at all.

Michael

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