LoaderMax slowing to nothing in full screen mode

[scottwitte]

Jack,

 

I'm building a pre-loading plugin for a virtual tour application using LoaderMax. It is working beautifully except for one serious and perplexing thing. When Flash is in full screen mode and the virtual tour image is in motion, downloading slows to a crawl. This only happens in Flash's full screen mode. If you take the browser window to full screen (using F11) the image is the same size but there is no slowing of downloading. And it only happens when the image is moving.

 

I've put together a demo illustrating the problem here: (Example no longer up. Sorry).

 

The image starts moving after four seconds. You can stop it for four seconds by clicking the image. The meter in the upper left shows how many KB have been downloaded in the last second. There is about 22MB in total. Of course you must keep clearing your brwoser cache and reloading the page with each run.

 

You will notice that the download speed stays relatively constant whether or not the image is moving. Now take it to full screen mode by clicking the FULLSCREEN button in the lower right. Notice how the download speed is relatively high unless the image moves. Then speed plummets.

 

Any clue how to get around this? I'm not sure even where to start.

 

Scott

[GreenSock]

Hmmm...I wasn't able to reproduce that problem. The speed stayed quite high for me even when it was moving like crazy. I wonder if it has something to do with the Flash Player prioritizing graphics rendering in that mode over anything else, so if you're on a slower system maybe it purposely reduces network activities in order to maintain better frame rates. Just a guess. Have you tried it on several systems of varying power?

 

In any case, I'm 99.9% sure the issue has nothing to do with LoaderMax specifically - it doesn't do any fancy bandwidth clamping or anything of the sort. It simply leverages Adobe's built-in stuff and wraps it in a much cleaner, more reliable architecture.

 

Oh, and are you on a Mac or PC? Just curious.

 

By the way, very cool app - it ran very smoothly for me and looked great. Nice job.

[scottwitte]

Jack,

 

Thanks for checking. Just to be certain, you did go into Flash's full screen mode by clicking the FULLSCREEN button on the bottom right?

 

As for prioritizing graphics rendering, could be. But why it would be something unique to full screen mode I don't understand. In any case, I could understand it maxing out the GPU, but my CPU cores are only pulling about 50%. I expect that would have more relevance. I doubt there would be some disk accessing unique to full screen mode so I can't imagine there is any disk access battle going on.

 

So far I've only tried this on my development machine, a quad core PC, WinXP32, FF3.6 and shoot! I realize I should have tested more before sending you my earlier post. I just tested several more browsers and now find that the problem is quite distinct in FF3.6 and Chrome 8 but not in Safari 5 and IE8. I'll bet you didn't test with FF or Chrome.

 

With that in mind it looks more like this is a Flash/Browser issue. Time to give Adobe another bug report, although it won't get the sort of attention you give your users. Darn! That is like a quarter of users will have issues unless I can find a workaround. Actually it is more than half of my visitors.

 

BTW, if you thought what you saw was interesting, check out the full Taliesin tour, http://www.tourdeforce360.com/taliesin.

[GreenSock]

Yep, I clicked the FULL SCREEN button for sure. And I was actually in Firefox 3.6. Seemed fine. Definitely sounds like another Player/Browser bug (as you suspected).

 

What I was saying about full screen optimizing playback for graphics rendering versus network performance was just that technically "full screen" mode kicks the player into a different mode altogether - it's not just scaling things bigger. I wouldn't be surprised if the Player shifts its priorities in that mode. And even if your CPU is at 50%, remember that Flash is largely single-threaded and there are often caps imposed on how much it's allowed to consume anyway, so on a quad core machine Flash could be sucking up all available resources for its single thread but still be using less than 50% of the overall threads available with 4 cores.

 

If I were you, I'd definitely try to track down someone on the Flash Player tech team. And file a bug report of course I sure wish they were as responsive as these forums too.

[scottwitte]

Jack,

 

Do you have Nvidia or ATI video card. I'm guessing not ATI. Weirdly, ATI drivers may be the culprit. Or not. Still investigating.

[GreenSock]

Yep, I've got Nvidia.