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	claesbas	2008-01-03 , 22:43
	Posts: 290 \| Thanked: 472 times \| Joined on Dec 2007 @ Gothenburg, Sweden	#81

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!

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Serge	2008-01-05 , 13:38
Posts: 503 \| Thanked: 267 times \| Joined on Jul 2006 @ Helsinki	#82

Originally Posted by Maceo

Have been testing .24 on N800/2008 final with a couple of transcoded files (media converter, N800 hq preset) and wanted to give some feedback.

- This is my preferred video player on the tablet.

- Lipsync works nicely for me.

That's good.

- When the OS shows a pop-up system message while a movie is playing, e.g. when the battery is low or it needs to signal that it has lost the WLAN connection, this garbles the video for as long as the system message is being displayed (most of the screen goes black, and a small false-coloured still picture of the last video image is shown in the top left corner of the screen). This happens both in full-screen and windowed mode. This is quite distracting. Quick fix: suppress system messages during playback (suboptimal, since you might not notice you're running the battery down) Compromise, if that's even feasible in Maemo: Suppress the original system messages, but replicate them in Mplayer's OSD overlay style (still suboptimal, since inconsistent with standard system behaviour). Best: let system popups overlay regular video output, even if that drops frames.

- When I try to switch from full-screen mplayer to another app via the menu button, this also triggers the same false-coloured ghost image; this even overlays the OS's tasks menu, so that one cannot see adequately which app one is about to switch to. When switching to a browser page including flash elements, the ghost image overlays the flash elements. When switching to GMPlauncher, its window remains blank.

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.

- From a usability perspective, I'd recommend that the launcher and the Mplayer playback window should be unified into one app with one app icon in the left vertical icon bar.

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.

- In some cases, after a video has ended, the app starts the same video over again untill I kill the process. I wonder why that is - perhaps I am missing something simple...

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.

- In some videos I have transcoded with Media converter from MP4 sources (N800 hq preset 400x240pix, 384Kbit/s for video, 96KBit/s for sound, 2-pass conversion and colour boost boxes ticked), saturated cyan areas show magenta pixel noise that is not visible when I play the file with VLC on my PC.

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

Apart from these observations, I am already a happy user!

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

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Serge	2008-01-05 , 14:19
Posts: 503 \| Thanked: 267 times \| Joined on Jul 2006 @ Helsinki	#83

Originally Posted by claesbas

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.

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

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.

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').

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.

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.

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Serge	2008-01-05 , 14:21
Posts: 503 \| Thanked: 267 times \| Joined on Jul 2006 @ Helsinki	#84

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

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	PinCushionQueen	2008-01-05 , 16:56
	Posts: 538 \| Thanked: 168 times \| Joined on Dec 2007 @ Seattle	#85

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.

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Serge	2008-01-05 , 17:18
Posts: 503 \| Thanked: 267 times \| Joined on Jul 2006 @ Helsinki	#86

Originally Posted by PinCushionQueen

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.

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

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	PinCushionQueen	2008-01-05 , 17:45
	Posts: 538 \| Thanked: 168 times \| Joined on Dec 2007 @ Seattle	#87

Originally Posted by Serge

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

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

)

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

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When you wish upon a star, your dreams really can come true... Unless it's an asteroid hurtling towards earth that will destroy all life.

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Rebski	2008-01-05 , 17:50
Posts: 874 \| Thanked: 316 times \| Joined on Jun 2007 @ London UK	#88

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

Thanks Serge, as always.

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.

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

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	PinCushionQueen	2008-01-05 , 18:13
	Posts: 538 \| Thanked: 168 times \| Joined on Dec 2007 @ Seattle	#89

Originally Posted by Rebski

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?

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?

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When you wish upon a star, your dreams really can come true... Unless it's an asteroid hurtling towards earth that will destroy all life.

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	claesbas	2008-01-06 , 22:31
	Posts: 290 \| Thanked: 472 times \| Joined on Dec 2007 @ Gothenburg, Sweden	#90

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...