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I've been trying to get HD movies playing on my laptop with no success as yet. I recently bought a Nikon D5100 DSLR camera and can record HD 1,920x1,080 / 30 fps movies with H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding. When I play with VLC the movies freeze up right at the start, and with mplayer using various command line options I get slightly better results but still not watchable.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop, with a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83GHz, and nvidia GeForce 8400M GS graphics card, and 2GB memory.
First question - should this hardware be able to play HD movies? I would be surprised if the answer is no.
I have been through the nvidia archwiki page and the instructions for enabling pure video HD (VDPAU/VAAPI) but have not had any success. VLC refuses to play movies if i enable "Use GPU acceleration", and mplayer works better if I set the video driver to OpenGL instead of vdpau.
VLC playing the movies runs the CPU at 100%, which makes me wonder if the graphics card is even working?
Any ideas on how to debug this would be very much appreciated.
Last edited by made_in_nz (2011-09-27 05:54:17)
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Does e.g. mplayer output anything interesting? It will say if your computer is to slow to play this video.
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Does e.g. mplayer output anything interesting? It will say if your computer is to slow to play this video.
Yes it does usually say its too slow. There is a standard message it displays each time with hints and I have tried these.
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https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NV … 2FVAAPI.29
If your graphic card does not have a lot of memory (>521MB?), you can experience glitches when watching 1080p or even 720p movies. To avoid that start simple window manager like TWM or MWM.
Additionally increasing the MPlayer's cache size in ~/.mplayer/config can help, when your hard drive is spinning down when watching HD movies.
I'm afraid I can't offer any more help.
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VDPAU is the way here, so you need to diagnose why it isn't working. First question: which drier are you using? VDPAU only works with the closed nvidia driver, the nouveau driver doesn't support it. Second, telling mplayer to use vdpau as video output is just one part of the equation, the other part is also telling it to use a hardware decoder. So, like this:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau yourfile.mp4I have no experience with VLC, all I do know is that VLC copies all decoded frames back into system ram, which means it's performance is far less than using vdpau with mplayer.
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VDPAU is the way here, so you need to diagnose why it isn't working. First question: which drier are you using? VDPAU only works with the closed nvidia driver, the nouveau driver doesn't support it. Second, telling mplayer to use vdpau as video output is just one part of the equation, the other part is also telling it to use a hardware decoder. So, like this:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau yourfile.mp4I have no experience with VLC, all I do know is that VLC copies all decoded frames back into system ram, which means it's performance is far less than using vdpau with mplayer.
bingo! Thank you so much, the '-vc ffh264vdpau' flag made all the difference and now the movies are all playing perfectly. Thanks again.
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