Playing video in 320x240 fullscreen

[ikm]

Here are the steps needed to play videos in 320x240 fullscreen:

1) First, install mplayer from the pdaxrom feed. No other additional software is needed.

2) Next, create the file /etc/fb.modes with the following contents:

mode \"qvga\"
    geometry 320 240 320 240 16
    timings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
endmode

Now, to play your file, you must first exit from X if you\'re running it (issue \'killall X\' in terminal). You can only play fullscreen video from the console at the moment.

3) When you\'re in console, run mplayer with the following command:

mplayer -vo fbdev -fbmode qvga -vm -ac mad file.avi

assuming \'file.avi\' is the file you want to play. You can supply any other options as well, or put them in your ~/.mplayer/config file. The only relevant options are

-fbmode qvga, which instructs mplayer to switch to the mode \'qvga\' described in /etc/fb.modes, and

-vm, which enables video mode switching

After the playback is finished, your screen becomes garbled. Issuing \'startx\' command to get back to X works ok, but when you quit it back, the console is unfortunately still garbled. No solution for this yet, apart from reboot that will surely help

[Zazz]

You can use CTRL+ALT+Backspace to exit X.

[zxerx]

1) First, install mplayer from the pdaxrom feed. No other additional software is needed.

mplayer first complained about libmad, which I grabbed from the pdaXrom feed. Next it complained about libvorbisidec which isn\'t on the pdaXrom feed.

Any pointers to libvorbisidec (also needed by xmms)

I\'m using mplayer_0.91_armv5tel.ipk from the pdaXrom feed.

[ikm]

mplayer first complained about libmad, which I grabbed from the pdaXrom feed. Next it complained about libvorbisidec which isn\'t on the pdaXrom feed.

Note that it\'s easier to let zaurus download everything it needs itself, either from the graphical package manager, or by ipkg install \'package name\' (not by file name, but rather by a package name).

Any pointers to libvorbisidec (also needed by xmms)

I\'m using mplayer_0.91_armv5tel.ipk from the pdaXrom feed.

The package you need is called \'tremor\'.

[cmisip]

Does this mode work on the 5600?
Playback is already possible with 320x240 on the 5600 outside of Qtopia so I dont know if there is any benefit to creating the fbmode.

[ikm]

Does this mode work on the 5600?
Playback is already possible with 320x240 on the 5600 outside of Qtopia so I dont know if there is any benefit to creating the fbmode.

There is no benefit from creating the fbmode on 5600. It only benefits SL-C7x0, and possibly 6000. Anyway, we\'re talking about pdaXrom\'s supported devices here, and they are currently limited to SL-C7x0 only.

[doublec]

I\'ve recompiled the latest CVS mplayer with the w100 ATI vidix driver from (http://wiki.self-core.org/atty/?MPlayer) to try and get w100 support. Using the vidix driver from the console mplayer tells me I\'m in an unsupported resolution (640x480). I switch to QVGA using the command line above and the fb.modes file and it runs. Unfortunately no image. I get a white screen with a purple square about the size of the mpg file I\'m trying to play to test it out. When I quit out I\'m back to the garbled qvga terminal.

Has anyone seen the white screen with purple square before? Any ideas what I could look at to fix it?

If you want to try it the ipk is at:

  http://www.double.co.nz/zaurus/mplayer-w10...re3try2_arm.ipk

You\'ll need libsdl and libmad installed. I also haven\'t tuned what drivers to include/not include. The common line to try is:

  mplayer -vo fbdev:vidix -fbmode qvga -vm -nosound mympg.mpg

I\'m using nosound for testing. I haven\'t tested \'mad\' support but sdl support for sound works fine. You could also try \'X\' vidix support:

  mplayer -vo xvidix -fbmode qvga -vm -nosound mympg.mpg

But that\'s even more broken I think.

[Zazz]

No solution, but the following may be helpful for dealing with the garbled console problem during testing. Activate a couple of additional consoles in /etc/inittab . For some reason there is only one by default, I usually have 24 on my desktop and use all of them...  It appears those additional consoles don\'t get garbled by the fbmode changes. Switch to another console using ALT + Cursor Right or Left. I haven\'t yet figured out how to generate ALT+Fn on the keyboard which is how consoles are normally switched (or any Fn keys at all for that matter).

[doublec]

Thanks for the tip, I\'ll do it. I\'ve found out that the width and height in the w100 vidix driver are sent to 480 and 640 respectively. But mplayer is comparing this to the X width and height which is 640 and 480. Because of the difference the vidix driver is failing. If I rotate the screen to portrait mode and run the xvidix or console vidix then the video plays using the direct access to the video memory.

I modified the driver to switch the 640 and 480 around and video plays ok using vidix in normal vga now. Issues at the moment are the video is not overlaying the mplayer window. For some reason the overlay is rotated 90 degrees out from the mplayer window. It looks like the x and y coordinates passed to the ATI funtions have 0,0 at the lower left of the screen in landscape mode. I\'m not sure what to do about that and the 640x480 issue.

I\'m also unable to get hardware scaling working at the moment so full screen doesn\'t work. The issue with that is the internal memory for the ati w100 only handles 320x240. Using external memory for 640x480 works but the video plays \'wavey\' and corrupted. I suspect something is wrong with the driver code there and would need to investigate.

qvga still doesn\'t work - probably the memory offsets are different for writing to the screen in that mode. More playing needed. Still it looks promising for using the ATI acceleration functions to get better performance out of the video.

[hwkeye]

Hi all,

With the tips for fbmode. It works but after 1 minute of playing, My zaurus freeze. Does anybody solve this problem ? It is because it takes too much process ?

Regards,
hwkeye

[ikm]

Hi all,

With the tips for fbmode. It works but after 1 minute of playing, My zaurus freeze. Does anybody solve this problem ? It is because it takes too much process ?

Maybe it\'s faulty / incompatible video file? Does it happen with all files or just with one particular?

As a prooftest, I transcoded \'Metallica - I Disappear\' videoclip to mpeg4 320x240 300 kbps 30 fps / mp3 cbr 112kbps, and it played very nicely at around 25 real fps (-framedrop option was necessary) all up to the end. It apparently ate up all CPU resources during the playback, so I very much doubt that freeze problem is about CPU utilization.

[hwkeye]

Hi ikm,

Thanks for your answer.
But I found out an issue by installing mplayer 1.0rc3 And it works well.

The other question I have but I think there will be no answer yet is about fast forwarding or play a file beginning at time.
For example, if you didn\'t finish ti watch your film, is there anything to do for keeping where you finished ?

thanks.
hwkeye.

[ikm]

Hi ikm,

Thanks for your answer.
But I found out an issue by installing mplayer 1.0rc3 And it works well.

Good!

The other question I have but I think there will be no answer yet is about fast forwarding or play a file beginning at time.
For example, if you didn\'t finish ti watch your film, is there anything to do for keeping where you finished ?

It\'s all about player\'s usage and configuration. Mplayer is quite a powerful thing. There is a documentation available at
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/i.../info.html#docs

[tcoulon]

Hello,

I followed the example but when I try to run mplayer it fails with the following error: fbdev: can\'t find requested video mode FATAL: cannot initialize video driver. This is on a C760 with latest pdaxrom. I tried simply removing the \"-vo fbdev\" and it works - however the Z freezes soon after start. I\'ll take a look at the mplayer version but could someone explain to me why on my machine I have *not to* use fbdev?

[Joshp]

What do you use to encode the video.  I tryed the one script I found on one of the forms but it don\'t work.  I am playing around with transcode but I don\'t know what to set.  Any ides and or suggustions welcome.  

JP