Notices

Not exact. With default player I can decompress mpeg4@352x240x800kbps+mp3@128kbps at < 25% CPU!

The few known limitations of this player are:
* can handle only few formats (no wmv, no flv, no h264, etc...);
* only < 352x288 resolutions and only 16x multiple
* jerky playback in full screen
* no B-frames

No problems with high bitrate/framerate, no CPU overloading with mpeg4. This is the reason why I hope Serge will use DSP for video too.

I agree. But 12 fps is not so bad for 320x240 h264 on 220 Mhz CPU....

No QPEL, no GMC, no b-frames, 250 interval for I-frames.

I agree.

Well looks like you still don't get it :-) The thing is that DSP is another CPU. Default player does not use main ARM CPU for decoding (both video and audio) at all, but uses only DSP. That's why main CPU is below 25% and playback is jerky. The DSP in fact is constantly at 100% when playing most videos and is screaming for help :-) You don't see DSP utilization in load plugin or top command or whatever. You need to watch /sys/devices/platform/dsp/loadinfo to see it.

Didn't do any further experimentation today on encoding videos for streaming, but I have figured out how to integrate mplayer with Opera.

First, become root.

Then create a new file named /usr/bin/runmplayer

$ vi /usr/bin/runmplayer

Add these lines to it and save it:

Make it globally executable.

$ chmod 0755 /usr/bin/runmplayer

Stop being root.

Close all Opera windows.

Change to your Opera config directory:

$ cd /home/user/.opera

Copy your current opera.ini file (not sure if this version of Opera randomly overwrites opera.ini like the last one did).

$ cp opera.ini opera.mpl

Open it

$ vi opera.mpl

Under the "File Types" heading, add the following lines:

(Add any other file types you know about, note that the line ends with a comma followed by a pipe)

Save it, then copy it over opera.ini

$ cp opera.mpl opera.ini

Start up Opera and find a video link to click on and click on it.

After about ten seconds, the movie will start playing!

It's a bit of a hack (maybe something the Mplayer installation script/module could do automatically?) but it works!

You'll probably want to tune the options given to mplayer, especially when each new release comes out.

What I do is run Apache on my file server, and allow web browsers to display directory listings, so I can now browse my archive and just click on a filename instead of typing in a very long mplayer command plus URL with a stylus from the command line.

This will make testing encoding strategies for streaming a lot less annoying, so that's now my next job.

Benchmarking done, but until I post a full analysis, I've found a "silver bullet".

This was on a single-pass encoded DivX, 352x240 @ 25fps.

I've found that if you encoded them with any video bitrate (well, I tested up to 600kbps) but keep the audio bitrate at 96kbps, and play it back on mplayer using "-vo x11 -ao gst -ac dspmp3 -cache 800", you get minimal frame drop.

With the "-noframedrop" flag set, a 60-second video took between 60.0 and 60.8 seconds to play, so I guess specifying "-framedrop" to handle the minimal amount of dropped frames would give you a VERY smooth ride.

More later once I've fully analyzed the results.

I really think that adding mplayer as a switch able alternative to the built in audio and video players, via selecting a URL in opera is a great move forward. With the latest version of TVersity Media Server (Version 0.9.7.1 July 30, 2006) I am now able to stream wma as mp3 and mov, wmv, flv etc as mpeg1 using the current built in players on Nokia.

I cannot say video play back is perfect (Frame dropping) because of the streaming resolution issues you are discussing in this thread etc.

HOWEVER, using TVersity as a media server where we can work on the TVersity profile for the Nokia 770 and AV player is probably a great way of ensuring we can maximise Internet streamed content visibility on the Nokia 770 in the simplest way for ordinary Nokia 770 users (Geek less)

More info on progress with TVersity and the Nokia 770 can be found in TVersity Forum and later posts in these threads. i.e.
http://s90264353.onlinehome.us/phpBB...pic.php?t=1761
http://s90264353.onlinehome.us/phpBB...pic.php?t=1789

I would appreciate any support from the Internet Tablet Talk community to ensure TVersity interacts with the Nokia 770 at the best levels of capability and compatibility.

2Nickster: Can you try to add opera integration instructions to wiki?

Now about the progress, I did not have much free time lately, but now volume control support for gstreamer output module is committed to SVN. There is still a problem with audio/video sync that needs to be fixed before '-ao gst -ac dspmp3' can be recommended for everyone and used by default. I also tried a quick search for AAC format description, but did not find anything useful yet.

As for the future improvements, right now it seems to me that having ARM assembler optimized color conversion and scaling would be a good thing to have next. But of course if we can make DSP do this work, it would be even better.

Scaling has bad effect on performance, but if we want a universal player that can accept any video resolutions and show them fullscreen, scaling support is needed. Using sdl video output, we can see that it can be implemented reasonably fast, mplayer just needs an optimized fast software scaler so that we can switch to x11 video output by default.

Currently your wiki is marked as read-only - let me in!

On the benchmarking, I realised that my results are pretty worthless. I don't think I understand what's going on, nor what to do to get meaningful results. The results I reported earlier in this thread are just numbers that don't mean what I thought they meant - 60s clips that take 60.5s to process doesn't mean that they play smoothly - in fact in this case playback was VERY jumpy.

I'm a programmer, and a couple of my skills are UNIX, Perl and Python scripting, so I'm willing to do any leg-work you can direct my way - just let me know what commands to run, and I'll run them on videos of varying size, FPS, ABR and VBR.

Some comments on the current progress.

FIrst of all, mplayer seems to be perfect for video playback on 770. 400x240 is the optimal resolution for crisp video. I've been able to play smoothly 18 fps with dspmp3. Very nice.

Second, although I salute the idea that the core should be fixed first and the app developed then, I also think that the scripts for opera integration are great. Magnificent, I might say. I just hope that someone would take the time to create a deb containing mplayer and opera integration. Also, at the same time, deb should register for the maemo platform the file types. I think that is work that will have to be made at some point anyway and delivering the deb making scripts to serge would help him out at some point and help us all immediately. Especially integration and means of registering of google video would be great (is mplayer able to playback youtube?). Does anyone know, if there would be a need for a plugin for opera to be able to launch google videos from web pages?

Third, I am not sure about how mencoder has been coded, but it might make sense to drop some seemingly unnecessary codeks from the pack to drop the filesize a bit.

Regarding codecs, I think the basics have been covered, but would be REALLY nice to have WMV capabilities.