Flash RR Skin Beta Release

**Gobby** · 04-01-2005, 01:35 AM

Just downloaded to have a look at your work ..... looks mint ... well done, I doubt I'll use it myself in the car as its not powerful enough but all the same ... keep up the good work.

**Arathranar** · 04-02-2005, 08:35 PM

Anyone resolved the really high cpu usage and slowness? It looks great but it's unusable on my car pc since it is so slow.

**guino** · 04-02-2005, 11:36 PM

It works great here.. It uses high CPU when doing the animation stuff (anything that does anymations it's expected to)... I am typically a flash hater (I feel like you are too), and I go to the extreme of having flash disabled on all my web-browsers... but I do believe flash has great potential OUTSIDE the browser environment. I have the latest flash plugins and the CPU usage is not bad... Look at the attached Image:

Yellow circles show CPU usage when "resting" on the following screens respectively: Audio Player, Audio Browser and Main Menu.

The Red Circles indicate Peak Usage while SWITCHING/LOADING the skin for the VERY FIRST TIME. I did close and re-open RR between tests.

The Blue Circle shows CPU usage when using MPC, the initial load is while the video is confined into RR's skin and the last part is while in Full Screen -- basically the same I get when OUTSIDE RR.

You just can't expect anything that does fancy animations to not use CPU.. but regardless, my point of view is that if you don't ever use your CPU up to 100% you might just as well use a 286 for the job in hand...

**Arathranar** · 04-03-2005, 01:28 AM

You just can't expect anything that does fancy animations to not use CPU.. but regardless, my point of view is that if you don't ever use your CPU up to 100% you might just as well use a 286 for the job in hand...

Sure. The problem is that the skin is unusably slow when animating. E.g. it takes many seconds just for the menu to open. I'm sure there's some problem with flash on my machine compared to others since you aren't having the same problems. It feels like I'm running a 286...

**guino** · 04-03-2005, 01:43 AM

You're probably right man.. it doesn't take many seconds to do anything in this skin here.. it looks like one of those unreal "advanced" applications they show on TV and movies where there's a bunch of semi-transparent stuff moving and such.. as an example, when I click on the side menu (left) the sound that it makes when opening closing is perfectly synchronized with the time it takes to slide in/out. If I were you, I'd download the flash update file from RR's download faq, and update that Flash.ocx file (from my site as well) while at it.. there's no reason why your 1.9Ghz machine should run slow .. there's a bunch of people running a VIA CPU at 1Ghz and they don't have any performance issues even when using flash..

**CdRsKuLL** · 04-03-2005, 03:04 PM

ok, had a great day at the uk car meet today.. came away with some ideas for my next install, and also an idea or two on how to improve the flash skin enabling it to run smoother on a m10k board, will have a play this week

CdR

**Arathranar** · 04-03-2005, 04:22 PM

I already have updated my machine with that to solve the fast spinning logo problem. Are there other flash updates I can apply as well?

I should also clarify your impressions of my desire for peformance

. I too have no problems with high cpu usage where appropriate. For web use, flash tends to annoy because it gets used for pointless intros to web pages or the web site has clearly been written entire in flash at the expense of adding real informational content - which when you're looking at the web site to find information out is pretty damn annoying! Flash for web games and as a front end for RR is a much better use of flash, in my opinion. I'm happy to have high cpu usage when animating UI inside RR. Unfortunately my machine isn't in the same state as the rest of you for some reason and I know I'm not alone since I've seen other posts saying they see the same behavior.

I tried just now and the flash skin worked at the correct speed inside IE. I saw ~5% cpu usage during most animations (peaking about 10-15% if I really tried hard to thrash the UI). Inside RR it hits 100% and that's clearly still not enough since the animations occur about 1/10 the speed they do inside IE.

I'm wondering if it's something to do with the transparencies. Does this flash rely on RR to draw the background? In IE, it's just a plain black background and I wonder if that's the difference in performance?

**Arathranar** · 04-03-2005, 04:24 PM

P.S. This skin looks really cool and applies some of the design principles I would if I ever get around to doing my own skin. I'd really like to be using it...

**guino** · 04-03-2005, 04:47 PM

Did you update your Flash.OCX file after updating your flash player ? That's listed in the RR FAQs..

High CPU Load, Buttons Fail to Respond, White box / square around logo's

**Arathranar** · 04-03-2005, 05:16 PM

Just tried the following:
regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\flash.ocx
run the flash 7 install exe in the link above
Try again - no change, still running fine in IE (flash logo in brushed metal also ok)
copy flash.ocx to sys32 and re-register it
Try again - no change, still running fine in IE