[besson3c]

I was growing tired of sites such as the MLB.com Gameday site basically just taking over my entire CPU whenever I watch a game, so I decided to try to see whether SSH X11 forwarding would perform well enough to keep up with the MLB Gameday app/site. Sure enough, it works just fine for this purpose!

If you need to access a Flash driven site or movie that does not require smooth animation (i.e. you can afford to drop some frames), read on...

While you can do SSH X11 forwarding to your local Mac, seeing that it would be using the same CPU, this is not going to help much. Therefore, these instructions are for viewing a Firefox window from another computer on your local Mac.

Requirements:

1) Another machine running Linux/BSD/Unix with SSH and X11 forwarding enabled (I believe most distros ship with this enabled by default in SSH), and Firefox installed on this machine

or

2) Another Mac with a copy of the X11 version of Firefox, SSH and X11 forwarding enabled (see instructions below for enabling this, it is not enabled by default)


and

3) The free Apple X11 app installed on your local Mac



Using another Unix based machine that is not a Mac:


ssh -X username@yourmachine firefox "http://yoursite.com"



Using another Mac:

1) enable X11 forwarding on both local Mac and remote Mac ("ForwardX11 yes" in /etc/ssh_config on your local Mac, "X11Forwarding yes" in /etc/sshd_config on the remote Mac), restart SSH on both Macs if necessary (you can do this via launchctl if you don't have physical access to the remote machine and don't want to reboot it). ssh -X username@yourmachine xterm will test that you have X11 forwarding setup and recognizing your X11 install

2) install the X11 version of Firefox. This builds cleanly using MacPorts (although for version 2). If you wish, I can provide a package installer of firefox-x11, just let me know

3) ssh -X username@yourmachine /opt/local/bin/firefox "http://yoursite.com"

[besson3c]

Crap, my instructions won't work properly with the Mac because I don't think the Flash plug-in works with the X11 version of Firefox for the Mac, and I'm too lazy to try this to confirm this.

These instructions work beautifully with a non-Mac/non-Windows machine though

[Horsepoo!!!]

Here's another tip...download the Flash 10 beta.

[TETENAL]

[besson3c]

Is it stable?

My instructions are still cool if you don't want any rendering power being consumed by your local CPU

[Art Vandelay]

I played with Flash 10 and it was stable. However, many sites are looking for v.9 to load their content. So, I reverted back.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Is it stable?

My instructions are still cool if you don't want any rendering power being consumed by your local CPU

For sure they're still cool.

Like Art, I found it stable but the downside is, as Art said, that some sites look for specific versions of Flash.

[awaspaas]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Crap, my instructions won't work properly with the Mac because I don't think the Flash plug-in works with the X11 version of Firefox for the Mac, and I'm too lazy to try this to confirm this.

These instructions work beautifully with a non-Mac/non-Windows machine though

You're right, it does work well from a Linux machine. There's no sound for me, although that could possibly be a good thing (a lot of times I don't want sound from webpages!) It plays youtube videos (no sound though) without dropping any frames for me (over gigabit ethernet).

[besson3c]

Oh yeah, I forgot about the sound... Oh well, sound shmoud!

I'm on a G4 Powerbook, and watching a ball game used to make my machine crawl... I used to use Synergy to bring up the game on my Linux machine (which is within visible range of my laptop desk), but since it is flash based you can't really increase the fonts to read much of anything. This solution is great for me

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

Seconded.

This is even more stupid since you would do this to spare your CPU from working hard, at the cost of dropping frames and/or resolution by using X11 ? So what do you do with those unused CPU cycles, while watching the game ?



-t

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Seconded.

This is even more stupid since you would do this to spare your CPU from working hard, at the cost of dropping frames and/or resolution by using X11 ? So what do you do with those unused CPU cycles, while watching the game ?



-t

No resolution lost, and I don't care about frames being dropped on the incoming pitches.

[turtle777]

Oh, and as an easier solution, may I suggest renice ?

-t

[besson3c]

You could, but I've played with that and it doesn't seem to help much. I honestly think that Flash on OS X is just flat-out broken. It is a massive pig.