Youtube on the N900

After my implementation of local rendering, Flash plays quite well on the N900. In fact, with a plain Qt flash loader (npploader – git://git.forwardbias.in/npploader.git), I get ~70fps. With a QWebView, the fps goes down to around ~50fps. With a QGraphicsWebView, the fps goes to around 55fps. Tested with fps tester.

This is not so bad but youtube was still rendering very badly compared to Fennec. With help from Nokia folks, I found out that the codec being served for Fennec is H.263 Sorenson and Qt/WebKit was being served H.264. The difference in quality would have been blindingly obvious had I paid more attention Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. On the n900, Sorenson Spark is the fast codec that is hardware accelerated (Documented here). If you use N900 to watch Youtube, append &fmt=5 to the Youtube url for better viewing.

Youtube serves sorenson based on the UA and I did some elaborate tests to figure what exactly it was looking for in the UA so we can add the same to Qt/WebKit for Maemo5. The long result is below. The short result is that it expects “Firefox/3.5” and “Maemo Browser” in the UA. Unfortunately, we cannot add “Firefox/3.5” as that would mean Qt/WebKit might get served Fennec optimized sites Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

One options, of course, is to contact Youtube and ask them to serve a different codec for Qt/WebKit’s UA but we are not pursuing this because this is really not important Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. I have a patch to Qt/WebKit that adds “Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser” to our UA for *.youtube.com by extending the existing QWebPage::userAgentForUrl(). Simon and Harald are brooding over whether we should bother adding this change. Time will tell whether we will apply it.

Results of the test:

Current Qt/WebKit UA – Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3
Current Fennec UA – Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l; en-US; rv:1.9.2.1) Gecko/20100126 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8 RX=51 N900

H.264 desktop UI
—————–
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5 N900
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 N900
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox Maemo

Mobile UI (same ui as m.youtube.com – 3gp/rtsp)
———————————————–
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Maemo Browser
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8 RX=51
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8 RX=51 N900
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 N900/Maemo Browser

Sorenson + desktop UI
—————————
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8 RX=51
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5 Maemo Browser 1.7.4.8 RX=51 N900
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox/3.5 N900/Maemo Browser
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Qt/4.7.0 Mobile Safari/533.3 Firefox Maemo Browser

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.