Arch Linux

kon

Member

Registered: 2022-08-02

Posts: 5

Trying To Solve The Mystery Of How To Make Vidoes Play Smoothly

Hi everyone,
a newcomer here.
I've been using  Linux/nix for a long time, mostly at work but and it was mostly Debian. Recently after being a loyal Apple user for over 10 years i decided to switch over to Linux and after a brief distro hopping decided to settle on Arch.
It's been a learning curve and a pain at times but it stuck around and i grew to like it. After playing with Gnome for a while i settled on Awesome WM, seems like it fits the bill perfectly for dev-ops work and media work like Reaper or Cinelerra-gg.
The only problem that stuck around and I couldn't solve is the video playback.
I've done extensive research on the subject and it took me a while to figure out what's causing it but I still have no idea how to solve it.
The basic problem is that i get judder while playing 24, 25 and even 30pfs videos, i mostly watch Youtube so most of the content is made in either 24/25 or 30 fps. I run my monitor at 120hz  1080p.
So if  i watch a 60fps video, everything plays smooth like butter, but if i try to watch anything below that i get the judder it's really annoying especially when there is a camera pan or a horizontal motion.

My question is - how do i solve this?
I've heard that there are players that adapt their frame rates to the refresh rate of the monitor and also compositor settings like the vsync etc. I'm using Picom and have my Xorg gpu config set to TearFree and FreeSync, that still doesn't do the trick though although the games run a bit smoother now.
How do Windows and Macos solve this? Seems like there must be a lot going on under the hood to just play a youtube video hehe..
Also let me know if posting  more details on the build/os specifics would help.

Thanks in advance,
Kon

Last edited by kon (2022-08-02 19:55:31)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 60,943

Re: Trying To Solve The Mystery Of How To Make Vidoes Play Smoothly

Try "mpv -vo=gpu --video-sync=display-resample"

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kon

Member

Registered: 2022-08-02

Posts: 5

Re: Trying To Solve The Mystery Of How To Make Vidoes Play Smoothly

Yeah i tried MVP with all sorts of flags, the best i could get was motion blur instead of judder. MPV would essentially turn judder into blur which looks even more weird. MPV is using vaapi and there are no errors during playback shown in the stats except for "Cannot load libcuda.so.1" but i have an AMD gpu so that doesn't matter probably.
I also tried Kodi with the sync frame rate function, it just freezes after 5 sec of playback.

Last edited by kon (2022-08-02 17:06:10)

kon

Member

Registered: 2022-08-02

Posts: 5

Re: Trying To Solve The Mystery Of How To Make Vidoes Play Smoothly

I was poking around some more and found this, might not be related to Arch per se but might shed light a few things..  https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?t=5377
Adding these to the mpv config helps a bit but does not completely eliminate the problem and of course doesn't fix anything in Firefox...

video-sync=display-resample
interpolation = yes
tscale = box
tscale-clamp = 0.0
tscale-radius = 1.0
tscale-window = sphinx

Last edited by kon (2022-08-03 03:11:35)

kon

Member

Registered: 2022-08-02

Posts: 5

Re: Trying To Solve The Mystery Of How To Make Vidoes Play Smoothly

If anybody is still interested, i ended up switching to Wayland(Sway) which made the judder problems more manageable. After some tweaking and a few updates everything everything works pretty well, YouTube videos play much better now. I still get judder sometimes  but it's on very few videos, i guess maybe encoding errors or something of that sort. 30fps and even 24/25fps looks much nicer now, not as great as 60fps but a lot more watchable.
So i guess i can mark this one closed, dunno if this would really help anyone but i hope it might be useful in some form.