32 bit graphic drivers installation
1. Problem
Some of the supported plugins make use of Direct3D / OpenGL to either render 3D content or to simply accelerate the rendering of videos. This requires that your graphic drivers are setup correctly otherwise you will either get an error message (Unity3D) or a black rectangle while other plugins just fall back silently to software rendering.
Since most of our plugins are 32 bit only, you are also required to have the 32 bit driver files installed. Many Linux distributions do not install them automatically on 64 bit systems and you most probably do not even notice that you are missing them. To check whether you have such a problem, you should run our system check utility
pipelight-plugin --system-check
and verify the result of the OpenGL test. On 64 bit systems you can get two test results, one for 32 bit and one for 64 bit. Make sure that both OpenGL tests pass successfully.
Alternatively, you can close all your browser windows and start your browser from a terminal. In case of a problem, you should see one of the following messages when using the Plugin:
err:winediag:X11DRV_WineGL_InitOpenglInfo Direct rendering is disabled, most likely your 32-bit OpenGL drivers haven't been installed correctly (using GL renderer "GeForce G105M/PCIe/SSE2", version "1.4 (2.1.2 NVIDIA 331.38)").
err:winediag:X11DRV_WineGL_InitOpenglInfo Direct rendering is disabled, most likely your 32-bit OpenGL drivers haven't been installed correctly (using GL renderer "Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Desktop ", version "1.4 (3.0 Mesa 9.2.1)").
err:wgl:has_opengl Failed to load libGL: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
2. Solution
Actually the instructions to install the 32 bit libraries are very different depending on the distribution and the graphic card you are using. Anyway, it is not sufficient to have the 32 bit libGL installed from the mesa package, you will also need the corresponding 32 bit DRI libraries! So here are some instructions for selected distributions and graphic drivers.
2.1. NVIDIA (Proprietary driver)
The Ubuntu package for the proprietary driver also installs the 32 bit libraries by default, simply make sure that you have enabled the driver in the "Additional drivers" dialog under settings.
Make sure that you have the libgl1-nvidia-glx-i386 package installed:
sudo apt-get install libgl1-nvidia-glx-i386
Simply make sure that you answer "Install NVIDIA's 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries" with yes during the installation of the driver and that is all you need to do.
2.2. Open Source Drivers: Intel / Nouveau / Radeon
The easiests way to make sure that you have the necessary drivers, is to install the 32 bit version of the libgl1-mesa-dri package which will install the necessary DRI files for all open source drivers.
Simply execute:
apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
You need the following packages depending on the graphic card you are using:
For Intel:
sudo pacman -S lib32-intel-dri
For Nouveau:
sudo pacman -S lib32-nouveau-dri
For AMD:
sudo pacman -S lib32-ati-dri
3. Further problems
If the performance is still bad although you have installed all necessary packages and video acceleration is working, your problem may not be related to your video at all. Silverlight for example synchronizes the video playback to the audio output and things like asynchron / delayed sound are a good hint that the real problem is the audio output. Take a look at the our Pulseaudio FAQ entry for more information.
