I just updated flash today, November 25 2013, which gives me version 11,9,900,152. The problem I'm having seems specific to the HBOgo.com site.
The problem occurs in all three browsers that I've tried, Firefox (my preferred browser), Chrome, and IE 9. Also, I've tried the various suggested troubleshooting suggested on the Adobe site as far as enabling Flash addon in IE after disabling (unchecking) the choice for ActiveX filtering. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling all 3 browsers, reinstalling flash, resetting all video card settings to default, going through the Device Manager and uninstalling the device entirely, making sure it has no errors or conflicts anywhere and the same thing for the network devices, they all indicate that they are working properly.
My device is an HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC running Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2. It has 4 GB of memory and the video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT. The drivers are all up to date and so is every application and its associated add-ons that I will mention. Also, it shipped with a Blu-Ray player which I've used to display Blu-Ray content on an external monitor with no issue. (If it can do that, then shouldn't it just be some software issue preventing it from playing back a video stream of inferior quality from hbogo?)
Regarding Flash Player, I've watched videos on YouTube and Hulu (and countless other sites which stream Flash Video) at resolutions of 720 and 1080 which played at framerates between 25 and 30 fps and which also did not use hardware acceleration but nevertheless maintained CPU usage of less than 70%. So, the computer can certainly do it even without the help of the GPU, and it can do it from other sites that use flash, but not from HBOgo. That's a second problem, even when flash video plays well, it's still not using hardware acceleration, but first I want to know why HBOgo's flash player is so much worse than everyone else's player.
Here is the specific issue: I navigate to HBOgo.com, pick any video to play and begin playback. Playback usually begins at a relatively low resolution (I'd guess 480 or so based on its obvious pixelation), and then steps up the resolution gradually. Usually after a minute or so, it will have reached its best resolution and that's when it starts dropping frames like crazy and pinning the CPU at 100%. The video looks terribly choppy and the audio skips the more choppy the video is. When I click pause or hit the spacebar for a pause, it will take two or three seconds as it spits out the last few video frames before finally showing the paused icon on the last frame. Those two seconds seem to corrolate with CPU processing since there is no noticable delay when pausing video anywhere else under any other conditions. Of course, CPU useage will drop back to 5 or 10 while the video is paused.
Right-clicking the screen lets me choose "Show Video Debug" which in turn tells me:
StageVideo enabled in OSMF: Yes
StageVideo is supported.
StageVideo is not being used, regular video 'probably' is.
This is where I got the information about dropped frames. If it matters, when paused, the buffer will fill to about 400 Mb plus or minus about 10 percent of that, perhaps. Also, during playback, the buffer maintains approximately the same amount, indicating that my ISP has no problem sending that much data to my device. The buffer seems fill to a lenght of time, about 60 seconds; so, as the video resolution goes down, the total buffer drops accordingly... sometimes it is at 200 Mb for 60 seconds with lower resolution, etc...
Speaking of my ISP, I have Verizon FiOS (I don't know why it would matter, but I'm in King of Prussia, which is near Philadelphia, PA). I just tested my bandwidth and it tells me that my IP is 71.175.97.244 and my download rate is 57.98 Mbps from some server in Matawan, NJ. I don't think networking issues factor into this at all. I say that because, digging into the developer tools (all 3 browsers show the same network activity: Firefox, Chrome, and IE) and clicking on the "Network" column, it consistently shows low latency for all the stream components. For example:
method: get
type: video/f4f
Timing Tab show:
Sending: 0 Waiting: 89mg Recieving: 159ms
This seems to indicate that I'm getting the data sent to me without any problem, so forget about network issues, right?
Also, regarding information available in Developer Tools, I can see that the flash video object has the paramater "wmode" set to "transparent". I already wasted time messing with this before I realized that the paramater is irrelavent while in fullscreen mode -- besides the fact that even when it is changed to direct or gpu when not in full screen, it does nothing to help matters. I think this was covered in one of the last discussions talking about lack of hardware acceleration on HBOgo -- the same discussion that ended with a few people saying that they were going to "throw in to towel".
What am I missing here? Why is StageVideo supported but not used? Why do other players which use flash play videos with better quality despite still not using hardware acceleration?
Windows Vista = updated
NVIDIA Video Drivers = updated
Flash Player = updated
Flash Addons (pepper flash, etc...) = updated
Firefox, Chrome, IE = all updated
There's got to be something I can do. What is it?