Boxee

Unsupported characters slow or freeze Flash elements on apps and websites

Details

  • Severity:
    Major
  • Operating System:
    Boxee Box
  • Number of attachments:
    0

Description

Attempting to view some content on the Boxee Box with characters not supported by the font used (normally showing as rectangles) will slow, briefly freeze or even basically hang the Box entirely depending on where they are used. It seems to be worst in Youtube videos with annotations that contain foreign characters, but the new Ustream app also highlights this as the Box seizes up trying to display chat on streams where people are trying to chat in foreign characters. You should be able to reproduce with any type of web video that is trying to overlay text and displays rectangle placeholder characters, and even the pop-up Google ads that appear over some streams will cause brief freezes.

Activity

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Rafael Mizrahi [Boxee] added a comment -
Thanks for reporting. please provide some website links examples.
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Rafael Mizrahi [Boxee] added a comment - Thanks for reporting. please provide some website links examples.
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Ben Blackford added a comment -
If you've got the Ustream app, you should be able to find an example pretty easily by going across the channels until you find one with boxes in the name, then open the chat. I will try to hunt down some Youtube examples for the annotation later since those seem to really freeze hard.
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Ben Blackford added a comment - If you've got the Ustream app, you should be able to find an example pretty easily by going across the channels until you find one with boxes in the name, then open the chat. I will try to hunt down some Youtube examples for the annotation later since those seem to really freeze hard.
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Ben Blackford added a comment -
OK, here are some YouTube examples.

These two have annotations near the beginning and the video seems to freeze up during that part of the video. Turning annotations off makes them play smoothly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCrIZeob4w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXfH6mc4fFk

Note that YouTube subtitles with unsupported characters don't seem to have the same effect. Here are a couple of videos that just have subtitles so you can test them separately:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbL69_7KFL0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX-limUcnvw

Finally, annotations in plain English with no unsupported 'boxes' showing do not seem to have any adverse effect, even when there are multiple annotations on-screen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDKPnaj_Rpw

There must be some common thread between how those annotations are displayed and the chat function on the Ustream app since they both choke the Box if there are unsupported characters coming in.
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Ben Blackford added a comment - OK, here are some YouTube examples. These two have annotations near the beginning and the video seems to freeze up during that part of the video. Turning annotations off makes them play smoothly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCrIZeob4w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXfH6mc4fFk Note that YouTube subtitles with unsupported characters don't seem to have the same effect. Here are a couple of videos that just have subtitles so you can test them separately: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbL69_7KFL0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX-limUcnvw Finally, annotations in plain English with no unsupported 'boxes' showing do not seem to have any adverse effect, even when there are multiple annotations on-screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDKPnaj_Rpw There must be some common thread between how those annotations are displayed and the chat function on the Ustream app since they both choke the Box if there are unsupported characters coming in.
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Ben Blackford added a comment -
It seems that the unsupported characters might not even need to be displayed on-screen to cause this issue. For example, go to the Gaming category on the Ustream Lounge app where there are lots of channels with Japanese characters. When you go into a live Ustream channel, the chat loads in the background even if you do not choose the icon to display it (sometimes it fails to connect to chat, so you may have to retry). When a line comes in on chat with unsupported characters the video will jerk and freeze even if you don't open the panel to display the chat. This is particularly easy to see when you go to a stream where the streamer also put the chat in the video stream itself, since you can see the "ustreamer-12345" users chatting in the video and note when the freezes occur (assuming it doesn't just quit responding on you completely).
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Ben Blackford added a comment - It seems that the unsupported characters might not even need to be displayed on-screen to cause this issue. For example, go to the Gaming category on the Ustream Lounge app where there are lots of channels with Japanese characters. When you go into a live Ustream channel, the chat loads in the background even if you do not choose the icon to display it (sometimes it fails to connect to chat, so you may have to retry). When a line comes in on chat with unsupported characters the video will jerk and freeze even if you don't open the panel to display the chat. This is particularly easy to see when you go to a stream where the streamer also put the chat in the video stream itself, since you can see the "ustreamer-12345" users chatting in the video and note when the freezes occur (assuming it doesn't just quit responding on you completely).
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Ami Ben-David [Boxee] added a comment -
reproduced on 1.1.0.17863

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Ami Ben-David [Boxee] added a comment - reproduced on 1.1.0.17863
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Ami Ben-David [Boxee] added a comment -
verified 1.1.2.19236
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Ami Ben-David [Boxee] added a comment - verified 1.1.2.19236

People

  • Assignee:
    Shay Zuker [Boxee]
    Reporter:
    Ben Blackford
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Dates

  • Created:
    Updated:
    Resolved: