Notices

Just finished a little informal testing with version 1.0rc1_maemo.22.n8x0 on ITOS2008beta /n800.

I am rather impressed with the decoding performance. My personal benchmark would be that Mplayer takes common XVID files without re-encoding and without dropping frames in too obvious a way.

These are my subjective results:

Standard TV series encoding (350MB)
624 x 352pix file, XviD 1.2 SMP, 23.976frames/second, 1092kbps avg. bitrate. Sound: 48000Hz 127 kb/s tot , Joint Stereo LAME3.96r

This file played well in still scenes, and the smooth scaling to fullscreen was impressive. Quite a lot of frames were dropped when there was a lot of motion plus detail (e.g. busy & sharp backgrounds like tree-leaves while panning the camera, explosions with debris). Perfect AV sync though until the end of the file.

Sound quality was okay, though I noticed a ringing harshness in the high mids that sounded a bit like low-bit sampling artifacts to my ears. Also, unrelated to the harshness, I noticed a semi-regular clicking noise in the soundtrack that is absent when played back on a PC.

Pixar Short film encoding (63MB)
672 x 352 pix file, XviD 1.1.2 Final, 25.000 frames/second, 2307kbps avg. bitrate. Sound: 48000Hz 384 kb/s tot , 6 chnls (3/2 .1) 0x2000 (Dolby AC3) AC3

This was a joy to watch most of the time. The sound was really great, and Mplayer coped well with the multichannel AC3. Again, fast-moving details led to dropped frames, though audio & video were always in sync.


Full-length movie (800MB)
632 x 258pix file, XviD 1.0.3, 23.976 frames/second, 688kbps avg. bitrate. Sound: 48000Hz 112 kb/s tot , Stereo

The low Y resolution of the film showed through in aliasing artifacts on the image for small details like striped shirts (not an Mplayer problem, though I wonder whether this could be further masked with post-processing filters). There were very few dropped frames, except for a sequence with fireworks, which spawned many light particles as well as specks of dust. Again, this had no adverse effect on AV sync, and audio remained unaffected.
In this file, too, there was a ringing harshness in the sound as described above, an overly metallic-digital quality to it.


So overall, I am very pleased with Mplayer! Thanks, Serge, for the hard work! The only downsides I can see at the moment are that I wish MP3 sound were a little more rounded, and high-movement / high-detail scenes for XVID encodes wouldn't drop so many frames - though this might well not be possible on this type of hardware. Thumbs up.

I looked at this yesterday. It seems that --enable-alsa didn't work as expected. ALSA library wasn't installed, but mplayer was built despite of this fact. Unfortunately I can't add this library to the build-dependencies because we don't have alsa on 770, but we're building the same package for all 3 platforms. However, if ALSA library is installed mplayer can be built with ALSA support. So, if I have time I'll try to fix configure, if I don't - I'll just workaround the issue by installing alsa library and rebuild packages.

Ed_ has uploaded a new build of mplayer to maemo-extras repository:
As usual, it contains fixes for the problems reported in this thread (thanks to N770-Freak, RipTorn, muon, evanjfraser and the others).

We hope that it might be a final test release, ready to be moved to the standard extras repository. Please give it a try (on all devices and OS types) and report any regressions if they still remain. Thank you very much for taking part in testing mplayer.

excellent , so far the only problem I have noticed in about 30 min of watching different short clips, is playing back .flv files downloaded from youtube with UKTUBE,even -idx doesn't seem to fix this.

In one of the previous version I used with OS2007 playing back youtube flash files was always in sync.
Its not quite as bad as .21 or .22 , but all the other clips I've played are fine, audio/sync is fine, and I have no problem playing back 700meg avi movies from SD card (I haven't had time to watch a full movie yet only parts)

Thanks heaps

-Rip

Thanks for this update! My reported problem about the volume level seems to be fixed!

But Videos are still out of sync. I have this problem with the N810 demo video (Nokia_N810.avi) and streamed/reencoded media from my HTPC (vdr with streamdev-server, mencoder). These files are played in sync on my desktop pc with MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.1.3 (Ubuntu 7.10). Any suggestions?

EDIT:
Forgot to post used device and OS version
N800 with OS2008, latest mplayer version .23

I'm also still finding the audio/video to be out of sync with version .23. I'm running OS2008 beta on an N800.

Thanks for reporting. There are many ways to screw up audio/video sync Some of the problems have been fixed, some may still remain. I'll try to watch Nokia_N810.avi more carefully to check for audio/video sync problems on it.

In the mean time you can experiment with trying different audio drivers (esd or alsa instead of sdl) to check if they work better. Probably audio driver latency is not properly compensated. Do you see audio/video sync problems with all videos or only with some of them? Can you report a version of mplayer which worked better on the same OS (on different OS), so that we could look at what has changed since then?

The version that worked on OS2007 was the one still in the repository I beleive, .18? with the flash files.

I tried mplayer -ao esd and that seemed to fix the sync issues with the flash video's just fine.

Thanks

-Rip

EDIT: I noticed when playing .flv videos from youtube bring up this in console.

Trying to force audio codec driver family dspmp3...
Opening audio decoder: [dspmp3] MP3 audio pass-through for Nokia 770/N800 (fake decoder)
ADecoder preinit failed
ADecoder init failed

I confirm RipTorn's post. Last working mplayer was OS2007 (N800) with .17/.18
I tested also "-ao esd" and "-ao alsa" with latest version. Movies played with esd are lip-sync, but the volume level isn't restored and it seems that more performance is needed (using osd results in a choppy playback).
I had no luck with alsa... playback was horrible

will this support RMVB format? Thanks.