Glitches when watching streamed movie (Solved)

[dcc701]

Watched movie with family using CD tahrpup on a dell optiplex 755 desktop. Mostly worked well but two issues:

1. After about an hour the movie basically froze (stopped streaming). There was a warning about memory being full. So I reloaded the movie in the browser page, then started the video from where it stopped streaming. We watched the remainder of the video fine. I'm curious why this happened and if there's any workaround in future. Do streaming vids actually fill RAM and reloading the page makes the memory disappear?

2. About every 15 minutes or so, the screen would go black, basically like a screen-off limited powersave. A move of the mouse restored it each time. I checked Event Manager/Power and it was NOT set to such intervals and did not even have the option of only having the monitor go off. Anyway I changed the setting there to 120 minutes but the problem persisted. I figured maybe there were some BIOS power settings that were responsible and so I later checked that, but couldn't find anything. Any way to stop pup from regular blink-outs?

[Makoto]

Watched movie with family using CD tahrpup on a dell optiplex 755 desktop. Mostly worked well but two issues:

1. After about an hour the movie basically froze (stopped streaming). There was a warning about memory being full. So I reloaded the movie in the browser page, then started the video from where it stopped streaming. We watched the remainder of the video fine. I'm curious why this happened and if there's any workaround in future. Do streaming vids actually fill RAM and reloading the page makes the memory disappear?

Streaming video normally (as far as I'm aware) downloads a portion of the video to your hard drive to allow you to watch it, at a time. It sounds as if the video download exceeded the size of your pupsave (in RAM or on your HD) at some point.

2. About every 15 minutes or so, the screen would go black, basically like a screen-off limited powersave. A move of the mouse restored it each time. I checked Event Manager/Power and it was NOT set to such intervals and did not even have the option of only having the monitor go off. Anyway I changed the setting there to 120 minutes but the problem persisted. I figured maybe there were some BIOS power settings that were responsible and so I later checked that, but couldn't find anything. Any way to stop pup from regular blink-outs?

It's most likely a screensaver. That's the behavior I had with the default screensaver in Puppy 4.3.1. I don't know how you might change the screensaver settings in tahr, but try checking anything that allows you to change the settings for X. (Desktop > pupX set properties of X, in my case.)

[Semme]

Yes, for screen-blanking it's pupx from your terminal.

[mikeb]

Ok later flashplayers appear to stream to ram so you cannot keep the movie..... only thing is I have observed the pup_rw layer remaining space to drop in unison which suggests a file in the system... this 'file' I could not locate anywhere by any means. I also don't think it could be a tmpfs issue since its supposed to keep the specified size that the user sets though actual ram allocation is dynamic.

This needs a bit of investigation since its a common problem for users with limited save space/ram/ who knows.

I also always have browser cache set to 0 since I don't use dial up...this may affect what the flash player does too...older versions download to /tmp so space usage is obvious.

Its worth saying using flash for big movies is a technical bad idea but one has to live with it...unless of course you get a browser add on which get you the file then you can save it anywhere, play it smoothly and all problems solved.

mike

[dcc701]

Thanks all--
Tried it again using a tahrpup fat32 usb I just made.
First tried setting pupX screensaver to 2700 seconds (45 minutes), applied to session, and the darn screen still went out every 600 seconds (the default).
Then just disabled screensaver using the checkbox, and now there is no screen pause.

Have been streaming a youtube vid for 1hr50min now, with no memory hangup. I did empty cache in Chrome beforehand, but couldn't see how to prevent cache from loading. (In palemoon I could do this, but having other issues in that browser now.)

Anyway, it's easier viewing now!

[mikeb]

Oh goodly...so more about the scrensaver than ram it seems

By the way pupx has never worked in the last 9 years of me trying it ..at least for making the screensaver changes..I usually end up editing .xinitrc or xorg.conf. It appears the script it makes does not run for some mysterious reason or perhaps .xintrc dominates....

mike

[Flash]

Dcc701, go to Menu -> Desktop -> pupX set properties of X. In the Screen saver tab, uncheck the box labeled "Enable screen saver." If that doesn't work, try setting the Delay to 0. What the heck, do both.

[dcc701]

Thanks Flash, disabling the screensaver there worked for me, but not resetting the seconds.