Flash player works only for a while

[Tom Metro]

Theodore Ruegsegger wrote:
> The flash player works fine for some time after I start up Firefox. If
> I leave the browser running and return to it some time later, flash
> doesn't play properly; the picture jerks or freezes and the sound
> comes out like a random syllable repeated endlessly...
>
> Am I the only one with this problem?

No. I see the same symptoms on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 and FF 3.0.x.

Are you running 32-bit or 64-bit Kubuntu?

I don't see this problem on a 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 machine.


> I've tried googling words like "flash stops working" and got lots of
> hits about the flash player not working at all, which isn't my
> problem. My player works fine and then deteriorates after the
> browser's been running for at least a few hours.

I've assumed that the problem is due to the npviewer.bin 64-to-32 bit 
wrapper around Flash. I haven't bothered to look into the issue, but if 
you google that file name, some chatter suggests that npviewer.bin is 
closed source code from Adobe, and that they're ignoring the problem, 
despite numerous bug reports.


> Can anyone give me suggestions on how to go about solving it?

Near the end of the first Ubuntu Forum thread that Google turned up was 
a script someone wrote to lower the priority of npviewer.bin and kill it 
after it has been running for a while. I guess that's one way to hack 
around the problem.

I've just been manually killing the process and restarting. I've 
resigned to the fact that Flash is a bad net citizen, and use it as 
little as possible.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/