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spock is offline spock
2009-02-28 , 21:26
Posts: 74 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Oct 2008
#1
I've very nearly got my n810 media set up the way I want it. I'm using mediatomb 0.11, tablet-encode 2.19, and canola2-beta11-maemo3 with the latest OS2008. I've tried a couple of things and here's a matrix of what works and doesn't:

Code:
       |  transcoded in advance,  |  transcoded on the fly,
       |  served via mediatomb    |  served via mediatomb
       |  UPnP                    |  UPnP
-------+-------------------------------------------------------
       |                          |
Nokia  |  Works flawlessly, but   |  Won't start playing for
Media  |  requires transcoding    |  some reason.  It tries
Player |  everything in advance.  |  "Buffering..." for a while
       |                          |  then just gives up.
       |                          |
       |                          |  I would be happy with this
       |                          |  option if it worked.
       |                          |
-------+--------------------------+----------------------------
       |                          |
Canola |  Choppy video.           |  Choppy video.
       |                          |  No difference between
       |                          |  transcoding on the fly
       |                          |  or in advance.
       |                          | 
       |                          |  This is my ideal config.
       |                          |  How can I speed up the
       |                          |  video playback?

I'm using these options to tablet-encode to do the transcoding:

Code:
<transcode mimetype="video/x-msvideo" using="tablet_encode"/>
...
<profile name="tablet_encode" enabled="yes" type="external">
  <mimetype>video/x-msvideo</mimetype>
  <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
  <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
  <accept-ogg-theora>no</accept-ogg-theora>
  <agent command="tablet-encode" arguments="-i -o -p best %in %out"/>
  <buffer size="14400000" chunk-size="512000" fill-size="120000"/>
</profile>

So I guess I have two ways to solve my problem. The first question is, why can the Nokia Media Player play back my videos so flawlessly but Canola2 chokes on them? Is there any way to get Canola to use the same backend as the Nokia player? Or are there other alternatives I can try?

The other question I might ask is why do my on-the-fly transcoded videos not work with the Nokia media player when they do work with Canola (just slow), and they also work if I do the transcoding beforehand and just use mediatomb to serve the file? Could it be an indexing problem? Do I have the MIME type set correctly?

Please, if anyone has this working or has any ideas what is wrong then I would really appreciate some help. Thanks!



================================


UPDATE: Issue solved thanks to a comment from attila77:

Originally Posted by attila77 View Post
EDIT: And the oft overlooked single most playback quality killer on the NIT: 48000Hz audio streams. Conversion of those to 44100 is a must.
YES!! THANK YOU!! That solved my problem. Now my mediatomb on-the-fly transcoding setup works with Canola flawlessly! All it took was setting the audio to resample to 44100 (was 48k). I knew it had to be something simple.
Last edited by spock; 2009-03-15 at 18:55.
 
ukki is offline ukki
2009-02-28 , 21:51
Posts: 882 | Thanked: 1,310 times | Joined on Mar 2007
#2
Originally Posted by spock View Post
Code:
<transcode mimetype="video/x-msvideo" using="tablet_encode"/>
...
<profile name="tablet_encode" enabled="yes" type="external">
  <mimetype>video/x-msvideo</mimetype>
  <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
  <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
  <accept-ogg-theora>no</accept-ogg-theora>
  <agent command="tablet-encode" arguments="-i -o -p best %in %out"/>
  <buffer size="14400000" chunk-size="512000" fill-size="120000"/>
</profile>
I would try some other tablet-encode preset like 'good' for streaming.
 

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spock is offline spock
2009-02-28 , 21:56
Posts: 74 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Oct 2008
#3
Sorry I forgot to mention, I tried them all. Even the "small" profile was choppy. That plus the fact that the Nokia player can play the "best" videos perfectly, just that they need to be transcoded in advance.

I have some new information as well. I just tried removing the mplayer package and trying Canola again, and it behaves much like the Nokia media player now (buffering for quite a while, then just stops and gives up). I guess that confirms that Canola was using mplayer?
 
ukki is offline ukki
2009-02-28 , 22:02
Posts: 882 | Thanked: 1,310 times | Joined on Mar 2007
#4
I never got the media player to work with Mediatomb if I had transcoding enabled. We even tried to debug it with the Mediatomb author. Canola worked fine when I tested it, but I'm not using it anymore so I can't say if something's changed.

You could try my Knots app too.
 

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spock is offline spock
2009-02-28 , 22:13
Posts: 74 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Oct 2008
#5
I just tried something I should have tried ages ago. I copied a sample of my transcoded video over to the tablet (encoded with tablet-encode -p best, as above). The Nokia media player plays it flawlessly and mplayer is still choppy (not even through Canola -- I ran mplayer directly). Same results as when I was serving it through mediatomb, so I don't think mediatomb is the problem.

Why is mplayer so choppy on my tablet? I'm using version
1.0rc1-maemo.29.n8x0.

I'll look into using Knots but it looks like I might have a more fundamental problem with mplayer.
 
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pycage is offline pycage
2009-02-28 , 22:49
Posts: 3,404 | Thanked: 4,474 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ Germany
#6
Not all video codecs are optimised for the ARM CPU in mplayer for maemo. Especially MP4 is known to be very bad with mplayer on the tablet.
Try using different codecs for transcoding.
 

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spock is offline spock
2009-02-28 , 23:19
Posts: 74 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Oct 2008
#7
Originally Posted by pycage View Post
Not all video codecs are optimised for the ARM CPU in mplayer for maemo. Especially MP4 is known to be very bad with mplayer on the tablet.
Try using different codecs for transcoding.
OK I'll try it out. tablet-encode is using mencoder with vcodec=mpeg4, which I assume is what you mean by MP4? Any suggestions/recommendations for which codecs are optimised for mplayer on ARM?
 
ukki is offline ukki
2009-02-28 , 23:37
Posts: 882 | Thanked: 1,310 times | Joined on Mar 2007
#8
Try xvid with mp3 sound.
 

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spock is offline spock
2009-03-01 , 01:41
Posts: 74 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Oct 2008
#9
Originally Posted by ukki View Post
Try xvid with mp3 sound.
I changed the command line for mencoder in the tablet-encode script to contain vcodec=libxvid (instead of mpeg4) and things got a tiny bit worse. I didn't change any other parameters though, so the bitrate is still at 768kbps with 192kbps mp3 audio.

Is there a different way I should be doing the xvid encode? Maybe another codec to try? I thought mpeg1video would be the simplest but it just played the audio (video was black).
 
spock is offline spock
2009-03-01 , 01:56
Posts: 74 | Thanked: 19 times | Joined on Oct 2008
#10
I just tried FLV as well (worse), and I also tried reducing the quality preset to "average" down from "best," which didn't help either.

Maybe I should test an older version of mplayer?
 
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