Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

some thoughts and question by a user..

I have used mplayer for some time now and it is great. Alot of movies work great. I know nothing abot programming or how things work beneath the mplayers optimazations. Though I still wonder..

I notice that its with multiple colors the choppy playback starts. An exampel would be a fast camera move in daylight outdoors. If its all in one colorspace it usually handles even some very fast shots. Whats not so good is that it freezes for the whole fast clip, usually only showing a few frames. I found that I can tap the play/pause button rapidly and get better playback which seems abit strange to me. If it renders the frames when I tap play/pause it should have the power to do it, at least a bit better. This was just a thought I just got and thought I share here.

And, I remember that Divx had some settings on the quality of playback. Could this not be implented in mplayer aswell. The quality is sooo good at the moment thart I could give some for smoother framerate.

I would like to see how bad the image quality would be if it kept going in ~24fps in those fast colorful clips.

Thanks alot for a great videoplayer for my n800. I use it daily!

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

That's good.

These glitches show up because of direct access to the framebuffer from mplayer concurrently with xserver. You can specify '-vo xv' option to use standard Xv extension instead, but will lose performance. Once the following patch gets into official firmware, performance will be good with Xv too.

Mplayer can be used both as a standalone player launched from xterm for example (in this case it needs icon) and in "slave mode" working as a multimedia engine for other applications (canola, mediabox, kmplayer and the others). It does not have an icon when working in slave mode. The bundled GUI is very simplistic and it was only added because there were no other GUI frontends available at that time.

[QUITE]- The app doesn't seem to remember which sound level I set it to for the last video via the OSD. Would be nice if it did.[/QUOTE]
Yes, it's a known problem which will be fixed later. OS2008 build required a change to other audio output method (esd), so not everything works perfectly yet.

Most likely when you started video playback, multiple clicks on video file had been registered in GUI. Once video playback finished, the second click was processed and the same video got launched again.

Having a look at this video fragment would be interesting. This could be some ARM specific video decoding bug.

Thanks for your feedback. By the way, garage project page has trackers where bugreports and feature requests can be submitted.

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Some scenes (scenes with lots of motion) need more cpu power for decoding than the others.

You are not getting better playback here. When playing movies, we need to synchronize video with audio. Audio plays at normal speed. If cpu is not powerful enough, it will be unable to decode video frames fast enough and video will lag behind audio. Once this lag grows and exceeds some threshold, video player starts trying to skip some frames. The problem is that video frames often depend on the previous ones (see http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/resea..._overview.html for some basic description). Only B-frames can be safely skipped. If the video does not contain B-frames at all, it needs to be sequentially decoded without skipping anything. You can force skipping frames anyway by using '-hardframedrop' mplayer option, but naturally you will get decoding artefacts. Though decoding can't be safely avoided in some cases, the player can skip displaying some frames on the screen to save time and catch up. Unfortunately (or luckily) video output takes only about 20% of cpu resources. So if cpu is slightly slower than needed (let's suppose it needs to be 10% faster to play some video file perfectly), all the frames can be decoded, but a fraction of them can be shown (for example, to get these extra 10% of cpu resources, half of the frames would have to be not displayed on screen). In the worst case, if the video is way too heavy, only I-frames will be shown occasionally, cpu will be overloaded trying to decode next frames and will never show them as it does not have any time left for that.

Pausing/resuming playback is not a good test and it does not prove anything. You resume playback, video plays a bit until it gets too far behind audio, framedropping comes into action and you get a slideshow.

In order to speedup decoding, video can be played in grayscale (using '-lavdopts gray' command line option) or at half resolution. Half resolution playback has horrible artefacts on ARM though, a lot worse than on x86. Maybe it is worth trying to figure out what's the matter (most likely it's some bug). Anyway, even on x86, half resolution playback has poor quality (you can try it with '-lavdopts lowres=1').

These settings affect postprocessing, mplayer does not use any postprocessing by default (so in the terms of DIVX, it already uses the lowest quality settings). Enabling postprocessing in mplayer will make it even slower.

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

BTW, mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.24 has been uploaded to 'extras' repository. We got a 'stable' OS2008 release now :)

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Any idea why every time I try to install this newest version of mPlayer, Application Manager keeps saying it's broken? I'm not getting any error messages in my log either.

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Any other information such as internet tablet device type, OS version? How did you try to install mplayer (clicked on the .install file, selected in application manager from the list of packages, used apt-get, ...)? Did you have older version of mplayer installed? Any other information that might be important?

With the (total absence of) information you provided in your post, it is hard to guess what might be wrong :)

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

So sorry (I know better than to post with no details :o )

Ok - I'm using N810 running the newest OS2008 (50-2). I did have an older version of mplayer I originally attempted to update to the new version using Maemo Application Manager. When I did this - I received a message "unable to install" - yet mplayer was listed in the installed applications list but listed as broken.

So I then uninstalled this and attempted to install it again from the list of packages in App Manager - still same result. I then went to the mplayer garage page and clicked on .install - still same result.

Red pill mode doesn't give me any conflicts or missing packages.

I'm a dork & I forgot about apt-get... Just did apt-get install and got the following errors:

mplayer: depends: libmad0 (>= 0.15.1b) but it is not going to be installed

I'm also getting ogg dependency errors for these but they aren't your fault - I've got broken ogg too; gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-ogg & gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-speex & gstreamer-0.10-plugins-bad-ivorbis

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Thanks Serge, as always.

PCQ, this came down for me as a normal Application Manger Update so the issue may be specific to your setup?

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Yeah... I might be right. I've tried apt-get -f install but still get errors for those 3 stupid gstreamer packages (they are all from the tuomas kulve repo). Perhaps I updated ogg before mplayer and those gstreamer errors are causing both problems?

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Thanks Serge for these excellent explainations! and congrats on a new stable version.

What is the thing with the built in 3d graphics acceleration? Is there one that is in use or not? I havn't really understood the current status on this. Could someone explain shortly and what it could do/help mplayer with...

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Hi Serge, I encode DVD’s to play on MPlayer using avi.NET which has a fixed resolution width of 480x. My query is regarding the sound.

If the sound is encoded to mp3 there is no problem but if I leave it as the original AC3 then video/audio is out of sync. It plays fine on my Vista computer.

Is this one of those things and I should just encode to mp3 or is there a fix?

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

Is there any way to increase the volume of sounds (especially mplayer videos) on the tablet? The tablet is much much quieter than my laptop when I plug my headphones into either and I have the volume turned all the way up on both! It's so bad that I can't hear the tablet at all on airplanes which is where I primarily want to watch movies :(. Any fixes?

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

did you left AC5.1 sound to AVI or made stereo one? Decoding AC3 stereo should be easier for HW (as it is mp2 based) than mp3 stereo but probably mp3 implementation is more optimized.

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

FTAO Serge - small bug, anyone else get this?

Using latest build on n800 os08 - I use the old display time out/screen blank each two mins ttrick to make the screen fade when I do a lock keys/screen press, it's how my tablet rests when not in use, and I rarely ever actually re-boot, just top up power etc and all is good.

However, after using mplayer the screen doesn't dim when doing the usual as above, and I have to re-boot it to get the normal behaviour back. this happens after every use of mplayer.

Don't know if that makes any sense, if so, anyone else getting this?

No big deal, certainly not for the functionality the app brings, but thought I'd mention it to see if there was an easy fix

cheers!

Re: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
 

CNN .m4v feeds start out of sync and stay out of sync on v.24 - OS2008 on an n800.

Put http://rss.cnn.com/services/podcasting/cnnnewsroom/rss in VideoCenter to get the feed.

I use either the built-in mediaplayer or Media Box for playback, but the result is the same. I'd like to induce a delay in audio to get it closer to the video, but I haven't had any luck. Other types of video play fine.