Author Topic: Mplayer Questions (Read 5673 times)

silencer51 · « **on:** August 11, 2006, 09:51:35 am »

I'm back to beta3, I'm using XFCE4 from Chero's feed, and everything works perfectly.

I have installed mplayer 1.1.5 bvdd from the cacko feed - while it is faster than the pdaX one, I still can't play a 640x480 file properly.

Even with a video bitrate of 200kbps and audio at 56kbps, mplayer gives about 15-20 fps max. The audio is also out of sync.

When I play the video with -nosound, it plays perfectly - which leads me to believe there's some sort of problem with the audio decoding.

The sound on the video is a 56k mp3.

I've noticed that libmp3 is nowhere to be found. (mplayer reports it uses libmad instead).

Could this be the problem?

stupkid · « **Reply #1 on:** August 11, 2006, 10:44:44 am »

The Cacko mplayer uses libmad because it is faster at decoding audio on ARM procs. There are ancient threads you could probably find on this.

silencer51 · « **Reply #2 on:** August 12, 2006, 12:07:13 am »

Ok, I think I've made some progress.

I've encoded a 640x272 clip with a video bitrate of 500kbps and an audio bitrate of 96kbps (mp3).

It plays fine with the following options:

mplayer -vo bvdd -cache 8192 -autosync 30

I am playing the video from the microdrive. However, after the portion of the video stored in the cache is over, the microdrive spins up every once in a while to load data, thus causing pauses and loss of a/v synchronization...

Any ideas about that?

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #3 on:** August 12, 2006, 02:45:54 am »

dont ask. its highly technical.

to sum it up, the pxa processor cant read from the microdrive and ram at the same time and reading from the microdrive causes a huge performance hit because it is so slow

try SD

silencer51 · « **Reply #4 on:** August 12, 2006, 07:17:58 am »

When playing from the microdrive, if I don't use the -cache option, the video plays perfectly! Weird...

Video bitrate @ 500kbps, audio @ 96kbps.

Not bad... ;-)

adf · « **Reply #5 on:** August 12, 2006, 07:05:47 pm »

Quote

When playing from the microdrive, if I don't use the -cache option, the video plays perfectly! Weird...

Video bitrate @ 500kbps, audio @ 96kbps.

Not bad... ;-)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138362\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I gotta ask< though... do you really think a 640x480 (or 270) ar 500k looks better than a 320x240 at 500k..or even 300k? My impression has been that the artifacting you get from hires lowbandwidth is actually worse than the loss of resolution you get going to lowres qvga while maintaining things like framrate and contrast.

eitherway, -framedrop and -autosync 30 are probably a good idea.

silencer51 · « **Reply #6 on:** August 12, 2006, 07:50:16 pm »

Quote

Quote
When playing from the microdrive, if I don't use the -cache option, the video plays perfectly! Weird...

Video bitrate @ 500kbps, audio @ 96kbps.

Not bad... ;-)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138362\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
I gotta ask< though... do you really think a 640x480 (or 270) ar 500k looks better than a 320x240 at 500k..or even 300k? My impression has been that the artifacting you get from hires lowbandwidth is actually worse than the loss of resolution you get going to lowres qvga while maintaining things like framrate and contrast.

eitherway, -framedrop and -autosync 30 are probably a good idea.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138431\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Unfortunately, I can't seem to be able to get mplayer to play a 320x240 video fullscreen...

InSearchOf · « **Reply #7 on:** August 12, 2006, 08:04:28 pm »

I have you used -vf scale=640:480?

Late

silencer51 · « **Reply #8 on:** August 12, 2006, 10:43:49 pm »

Thanks InSearchOf, that did the trick.

However I can see no difference in performance between 640x272 and 320x163.

The 640x272 looks crisper, as it should.

It's a pity that while the Z can play xvid videos beautifully, the internal microdrive holds it back...

Are CF cards faster than SD cards? Perhaps the videos played through a CF card won't have this problem...

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #9 on:** August 14, 2006, 06:35:03 am »

the way the CF card is wired up causes a big performance hit, SD dosent have this problem however unless you have high speed support for SD cards enabled the SD card might not be fast enough

basically there are problems with CF and SD, SD we dont have the spec so writing drivers is hard and CF is wired up so that while acsessing the CF card you cant talk to the RAM (shared bus)

silencer51 · « **Reply #10 on:** August 15, 2006, 08:05:45 pm »

The SD card I've tried is 66x and when playing the same 500mb video I get minor stuttering here and there too... :-(

So upgrading to a high speed CF card won't solve the problem, then?

Meanie · « **Reply #11 on:** August 16, 2006, 01:53:00 am »

Quote

The SD card I've tried is 66x and when playing the same 500mb video I get minor stuttering here and there too... :-(

So upgrading to a high speed CF card won't solve the problem, then?
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138740\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I think the problem with the MicroDrive is that it goes to sleep after some time of inactivity, ie when the movie is being played and when the section has finished playing, the microdrive is read again, but since it has gone to sleep it takes a short moment for it to wake up again and spin to the right location causing a slight delay. what you want is to enable buffering, but make sure you disable any swapfile or partition that may have been enabled. you want the buffer in cache/real memory, not in swap.

neo_com_3 · « **Reply #12 on:** September 18, 2006, 05:52:47 am »

Hi there...

I want to try mplayer, but when I install it, I use the terminal and it won't run...

Why?

Tnx...

Da_Blitz · « **Reply #13 on:** September 19, 2006, 12:27:49 am »

what error messages do you get?

zi99y · « **Reply #14 on:** October 19, 2006, 09:02:49 am »

To resurrect an mplayer thread with a couple of my finds-

I just can't get a 640x480 movie running smoothly enough, this isn't such a problem as I have encoded some 320x240 vids to work, the problem now is running them fullscreen.

- BVDD mode will not run when the screen size is set to 320x240 using xrandr

- BVDD doesn't work with -vf scale=640:480

What does work:

- I can use xrandr to resize the screen and use the default video out device, but it's still not fast enough to keep, this is what I use most of the time.

- Using the -vm parameter with BVDD works! screen is resized and video's play beautifully BUT!! when the screen is resized there is some evil looking flashing, and once mplayer has quit there is horrid artifacts left behind until the screen refreshes. I'm scared to use this mode in case it's damaging the screen.

So does anyone have any input into this problem, or some settings they can recommend me?

Thanks

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Author Topic: Mplayer Questions (Read 5673 times)