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soylent_green_is_hamster

Member

Registered: 2006-11-15

Posts: 109

terrible mplayer h264 performance

Hi,

until recently, I was able to use mplayer to watch a h264 encoded 1080P movie at about 30% CPU usage (I have a core 2 duo E8500). But now I suddenly can't.

CPU usage goes up to 100%, and the film stutters terribly. I haven't changed any mplayer settings (still using xv)

Anyone have any ideas? has anything changed recently

Roberth

Member

From: The Pale Blue Dot

Registered: 2007-01-12

Posts: 894

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

Maybe an issue in svn, take the pkgbuild from aur and update it.

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graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

Website

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

@op - as a side note, what kind of video card do you have?  If it's an nvidia that's capable of using VDPAU, I would suggest using a CDPAU-enabled mplayer.  The results are remarkable.

I have a vdpau-enabled mplayer + $35 Nvidia 8400GS on an old Athlon XP machine.  The machine without VDPAU is far too slow to playback even a 720p23 h264 file (3,100 Kbps). CPU usage for mplayer goes to 100 % and play back isn't watchable in the least. When I enable VDPAU, playback is smooth as silk and cpu usage for mplayer averages 2-3 % during playback. VDPAU is truly remarkable. I also used it to watch an OTA 720p60 mpeg file @ 14,800 Kbps and CPU usage was only 5-6 % during playback.

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soylent_green_is_hamster

Member

Registered: 2006-11-15

Posts: 109

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

yeah - i was planning on giving vdpau a go at some point
did you just build mplayer-svn and configure --enable-vdpau?

mplayer trunk doesn't build atm, I'll give it a go in the near future...

SyXbiT

Member

From: Seattle, WA

Registered: 2008-06-28

Posts: 177

Website

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

does mplayer from /extra have vdpau enabled?
I thought it would, cause it's a newish build

Gen2ly

Member

From: Sevierville, TN

Registered: 2009-03-06

Posts: 1,529

Website

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

Vdpau is on the new side with patches just being put intomplayer.  integration into mplayer, detection, how it works with other libraries is just starting from what i understand.  soylent isright to try vdpau compiling from svn is necessary.

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Themaister

Member

From: Trondheim, Norway

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 652

Website

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

VDPAU got integrated into mplayer some time ago. Only need a reasonable updated nvidia driver and --enable-vdpau when building mplayer. You also need:
vo=vdpau,xv,
vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,

in the mplayer config to actually use the HW accel.

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SyXbiT

Member

From: Seattle, WA

Registered: 2008-06-28

Posts: 177

Website

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

VDPAU got integrated into mplayer some time ago. Only need a reasonable updated nvidia driver and --enable-vdpau when building mplayer. You also need:
vo=vdpau,xv,
vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,

in the mplayer config to actually use the HW accel.

so are you saying that the mplayer in /extra does not have vdpau enabled?

brisbin33

Member

From: boston, ma

Registered: 2008-07-24

Posts: 1,796

Website

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

so are you saying that the mplayer in /extra does not have vdpau enabled?

looking at the PKGBUILD from /var/abs:

   ./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-gui --disable-arts --enable-x11 \
        --enable-runtime-cpudetection --confdir=/etc/mplayer --disable-nas \
        --enable-gl --enable-tv-v4l1 --enable-tv-v4l2 --enable-largefiles \
        --disable-liblzo --disable-speex --disable-openal \
        --disable-fribidi --disable-libdv --disable-musepack \
        --language=all --disable-esd --disable-mga \
        --disable-libamr_nb --enable-lirc --enable-radio --enable-radio-capture \
        --extra-cflags="-I/usr/lib/live-media" --disable-nemesi --enable-freetype \
        --enable-xvmc || return 1

i'm gonna say no; i just rebuilt it with the mentioned tweaks but can't test for any improvements till next week.

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Kenni

Member

From: Denmark

Registered: 2007-01-25

Posts: 64

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

No, mplayer doesn't (by decision) have vdpau support...there was a feature request about it a few months ago in the bugtracker, but it was denied by a developer. I've just send a request for reopening, but I'm doubtful if it will help anything
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13011

Kenni

Member

From: Denmark

Registered: 2007-01-25

Posts: 64

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

Apparently the current mplayer in extra actually DOES have VDPAU support (even without --enable-vdpau)

My request for reopening the feature request was denied, as the developer got a "missing library error" when trying to play with vdpau (probably with a capable Nvidia card, but without the driver). On my own system - with the latest NVIDIA driver, but only a Geforce 7xxx unsupported card - I don't get vdpau in the video output list when doing a "mplayer -vo help", but it seems like other people (with VDPAU capable cards) have it in the list:

mplayer 29318-1 in extra appears to support VDPAU out of the box. It doesn't have --enable-vdpau in PKGBUILD but lists vdpau in -vo help output. As this makes it link against libnvidia-tls from the nvidia-utils package, which non-nvidia users won't have, it must break it for them, right? Or am I missing something?

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 83#p557183

Can someone confirm?

Procyon

Member

Registered: 2008-05-07

Posts: 1,819

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

I have mplayer-29318-1 from [extra] but -vo vdpau doesn't work.

Kenni

Member

From: Denmark

Registered: 2007-01-25

Posts: 64

Re: terrible mplayer h264 performance

Ahh, crap...apparently the current mplayer x86_64 package was uncleanly build by the package maintainer, which resulted in the VDPAU support. When this is "fixed", we will loose the VDPAU support again. The current 32 bit package doesn't have VDPAU support.

This was the reply I got from the Arch Developer JGC (who denied the feature request):

(Make)depending on nvidia drivers for packages not related to it is not
an option. It appears that the developer who built the x86_64 version is
still not building in chroots, and built the package on a system with
nvidia drivers, which is why I get this VDPAU support thing in my
mplayer (though I don't have nvidia hardware or drivers).
The only acceleration API that I'm willing to add to
mplayer/ffmpeg/whatever in the near future is VA-API, which is a
freedesktop standard with backends for more than just VDPAU.

Last edited by Kenni (2009-05-24 20:20:29)