Alien Pastures

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Tag: palemoon

Pale Moon update fixes high CPU usage for HD video playback

August 6, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Some people had reported choppy playback and/or a high CPU load when using the 27.4.0 release of the Pale Moon browser – for instance when playing HD videos on Youtube. See these topic posts on the LQ Slackware forum. A bugfix update of Pale Moon was released a few days ago and according to the releasenotes, the new Pale Moon 27.4.1 addresses these issues. I have uploaded fresh packages for palemoon-27.4.1 to my package repository so that you can check that this is true.

Remember to install ffmpeg if you are running Slackware 14.2. A ffmpeg package was added to slackware-current but you still might want to replace that package with my enhanced build of it. And if you are using Slackware’s KDE 4 you must replace Slackware’s oxygen-gtk2 package with my updated version of oxygen-gtk2 to prevent browser crashes.
This is what Youtube reports about the media capabilities of Pale Moon 27.4 on Slackware:

 

If your Pale Moon browser shows that “MSE & WebM VP9” is not supported, you need to go into the browser preferences menu and in the “Content” tab, un-check the “Use MSE asynchronously” so that you can check “Enable MSE for WebM video”:

NOTE: let me know and do not bother the Pale Moon developers with any issues you encounter while using my Slackware package instead of the official binaries.

Pale Moon browser new release, better media support

July 13, 2017 / / 4 Comments

The Pale Moon browser had a new release this week.

I have updated my palemoon.SlackBuild and have uploaded fresh Slackware packages for this new Pale Moon 27.4.0. As previously shared with you, I diverge from the official developers’ recommendations about how to compile this browser on Linux. For instance the gcc compiler I used on Slackware 14.2 is gcc-5.3.0 (which is part of this distro release). On -current I failed compiling with the gcc-7.1.0 compiler which is the default there and I had to create a “gcc5” package for gcc-5.4.0 (which was an earlier gcc version in slackware-current). I wrote an article on this very blog about that gcc5 package if you are interested, it can be installed in parallel with Slackware’s own gcc-7. There are some other differences, mainly in the way I optimize my build.

The resulting palemoon packages have been quite stable. Note that many crashes are triggered when you use Pale Moon in KDE4 with the oxygen theme selected for your GTK+2 programs. Get my patched oxygen-gtk2-1.4.6.1 package in my SlackBuild repository, if you are experiencing crashes.

What’s the news for this release? The most effort seems to have gone into solving the media streaming issues, by rewriting the Media Source Extensions (MSE) code to make it compliant with the official MSE specifications. This is what Youtube reports about the media capabilities of the new Pale Moon on Slackware:

 

Be aware that unlike the official binaries, my palemoon package relies on ffmpeg for the multimedia support – not on gstreamer. This means that on Slackware 14.2 you need to install a ffmpeg package (I used my own ffmpeg-3.3.2 package to compile palemoon). Slackware-current already has a ffmpeg package so you are OK there (but you still might want to replace that ffmpeg with my own package which is more feature-packed).

NOTE: let me know and do not bother the Pale Moon developers with any issues you encounter while using my Slackware package instead of the official binaries.

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