I'm running 98SE with the unofficial SP3 beta, KernelEX 4 final 2, and RP9 with the RP10 salvation beta. I have Flash Player 9 installed on IE6, and when I watch flash movies, all is well unless I go fullscreen. Then the performance degrades to nearly slideshow speed.

Is it my hardware? The specs are:

Pentium III 1ghz

512MB RAM

Geforce 5200 128MB PCI

750GB HDD @ Ultra DMA 5 (on Promise Ultra133tx2 card)

I would think that this setup should be more than beefy enough to play a flash movie in fullscreen. How come I seem to remember fullscreen games being faster than windowed, and now flash is faster windowed than fullscreen? Is it the scaling? Is there a fix?

Help please, I really want to watch flash movies comfortably on my 98 box.

Fullscreen Flash video is incredibly CPU hungry. I have a XP 3200+ (2.2GHz)/GeForce 6800XT 256MB AGP/2GB of RAM, when I watch videos on Hulu I drop my resolution down to 800x600 (1024x640 for widescreen videos) from 1680x1050 and the video will play fine in fullscreen.

Edited October 4, 200916 yr by redxii

Hrm, I was having this same problem on a 1024x768 monitor with the same setup but a 64MB Geforce 4 420 MX.. I'm now running at 1360x768.. Considering I doubled many aspects of the graphics performance and only raised the resolution a little bit I'd think it should perform better, but it doesn't...

And BTW: I know Hulu and such are higher resolution and take more horsepower, but I have trouble fullscreening even lower quality stuff. Low quality youtube does OK, but I have lots of trouble with blip.tv content for some reason. Ex. the latest video here: http://www.cinemassacre.com/new/index.php

Edited October 4, 200916 yr by EyesOfARaven

A graphics card upgrade would help only if Flash could take advantage of your GPU. Win 98 should have System Monitor and you can run it in the background to see if your CPU is maxing out when videos are fullscreen.

Edited October 5, 200916 yr by redxii

Yep that's it. I'm not sure why blip.tv stuff takes so much more CPU than youtube and other sites though. It's odd.

I've already read the same complaint about Flash Player on another forum.

Seems to relate to full screen rather than to the number of pixels.

And Flash Player just sucks anyway.

So no, it's not related to a specific hardware. And any decent piece of software should be able to display a video on your computer, which is able of running 3D games.

Flash just sucks. Compare the CPU usage between a Flash movie playing in the web browser and a native media player program. It's like night and day.