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#1 2009-12-16 22:37:53

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Media playback too slow

Hi,

I have a ThinkPad T61p that runs a Core 2 Duo T9300, being the top-line of Core 2 with 6 MB L2 Cache.

Lately I started to watch some HD videos and made the observation that my system was too slow to handle 1080p files in h.246 format. In fact, it has already problems with some 720p movies.

I used -ao null -cache 16000, problem stayed, CPU usage fairly high up to 100% where it starts to stutter, even in the first minute of a movie. I tried Arch's stock mplayer packet as well as AUR's mplayer-mt, where I also enabled the multithreading option (does not work well for DVD, works fine for h.246 although it barely helps!)


Friends tell me a 2 Ghz Core 2 should carry out HD content just fine.

I also tried VDPAU with my Quadro GFX. It does not work with these videos, some nice error messages and that's it. It works with the Elefant's Dream video, but that one is also watchable using the CPU.


Please, fellow Archers, tell me what's wrong here and what's your experience with a comparable setup! :-)

Thank you!
ypnos

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#2 2009-12-16 22:55:11

GogglesGuy
Member
From: Rocket City
Registered: 2005-03-29
Posts: 610
Website

Re: Media playback too slow

Perhaps your disk io is just too slow...?

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#3 2009-12-16 23:17:32

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Re: Media playback too slow

Thanks, but my disk IO is capable enough, I also tried a large caching value, it didn't help. The CPU is really working, not waiting..

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#4 2009-12-17 05:11:14

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: Media playback too slow

What were the error messages from VDPAU?

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#5 2009-12-17 07:57:03

bangkok_manouel
Member
From: indicates a starting point
Registered: 2005-02-07
Posts: 1,556

Re: Media playback too slow

doesn't mplayer needs a patch and/or at least a rebuild to use vdpau? make sure you have libvdpau installed also. you should have no problem playing 1080p with vdpau, it's really an amazing piece of code. using xbmc, I'm playing any kind of HD content with a low-end nvidia card + low-end dual-core amd cpu, cpu never goes above 2 digits of usage...

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#6 2009-12-17 11:44:40

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Re: Media playback too slow

I used mplayer-mt, during compilation nvidia driver and libs was found so vdpau was enabled. I will have a look at the errors when I'm back home.

Apart from that, do you think my machine should be capable of playing these movies (w/o vdpau)?

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#7 2009-12-17 12:05:38

bangkok_manouel
Member
From: indicates a starting point
Registered: 2005-02-07
Posts: 1,556

Re: Media playback too slow

I can play 1080p with a c2d 2ghz and intel 965gm. it is watchable only if I use the bfs scheduler + schedtool but you can feel the machine is on its knees (but hey, it works). I just watched some short family movies so I have no idea how it would behave on the long run. also, you may not need the bfs sched thanks to 2.6.32 improvements on cfs but I didn't try. OTOH, 720p is really smooth, I have no issue at all.

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#8 2009-12-17 17:25:26

MadCat_X
Member
Registered: 2009-10-08
Posts: 189

Re: Media playback too slow

Have you tried playng your video with

mplayer -vo xv

There is mplayer-vdpau in AUR which I've been using for some time and it works just great. It might be worth a shot...

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#9 2009-12-17 18:34:06

lolilolicon
Member
Registered: 2009-03-05
Posts: 1,722

Re: Media playback too slow

bangkok_manouel wrote:

make sure you have libvdpau installed also

I built mplayer without libvdpau installed but I can get vdpau support

ffmpeg12vdpau
ffwmv3vdpau
ffvc1vdpau
ffh264vdpau
ffodivxvdpau

So, what's the point in installing libvdpau?


This silver ladybug at line 28...

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#10 2009-12-18 00:42:05

MadCat_X
Member
Registered: 2009-10-08
Posts: 189

Re: Media playback too slow

I've done a bit of a testing with mplayer-vdpau using different -vo. I downloaded some 1080p movie trailers and here are my findings:
xv: CPU 0 hogged up at 100%, very low fps, unwatchable
gl(fast): CPU0 and 1 at 100%, better fps, somewhat watchable
gl2(yuv): CPU0 at 100%, slightly better than gl, some trailers watchable, some tended to slow down to a crawl now and then
vdpau: CPU0 at approx 30%, perfect quality and speed

I used SMPlayer as mplayer frontend and I had KWin compositing enabled during testing. I have Qosmio X300 notebook with C2D T9550 and GeForce9800M GTS. So my recommendation is to drop mplayer-mt which seems to be a bit broken to me and investigate why vdpau does not work for you. Can you run "vdpinfo"? What is the output?

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#11 2009-12-18 01:05:41

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: Media playback too slow

ypnos wrote:

I used mplayer-mt, during compilation nvidia driver and libs was found so vdpau was enabled. I will have a look at the errors when I'm back home.

Apart from that, do you think my machine should be capable of playing these movies (w/o vdpau)?

It depends on the level of compression of the file. I can easily create H264 streams that will cripple Mplayer with a Phenom II 955 (3.2Mhz) and 8GB of RAM and drivers like xv.

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#12 2009-12-19 02:07:02

ypnos
Member
Registered: 2007-12-30
Posts: 59

Re: Media playback too slow

Thank you all very much for your very valuable input!

I indeed found that I did not have libvdpau installed. I now installed the lib and built mplayer-vdpau-svn package. It works like a charm and plays all the videos now, at less than 10% CPU consumption! Without vdpau for decoding, my CPU is still not fast enough.

So I assume that libvdpau enables to play more formats compared to stock NVIDIA driver (before, I could play some movies like Elephant's Dream, but most only gave error messages). I'm very happy now and proud again of my shiny Thinkpad big_smile

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#13 2009-12-19 06:43:06

lolilolicon
Member
Registered: 2009-03-05
Posts: 1,722

Re: Media playback too slow

ypnos wrote:

Thank you all very much for your very valuable input!

I indeed found that I did not have libvdpau installed. I now installed the lib and built mplayer-vdpau-svn package. It works like a charm and plays all the videos now, at less than 10% CPU consumption! Without vdpau for decoding, my CPU is still not fast enough.

So I assume that libvdpau enables to play more formats compared to stock NVIDIA driver (before, I could play some movies like Elephant's Dream, but most only gave error messages). I'm very happy now and proud again of my shiny Thinkpad big_smile

I did the exact same thing yesterday, and finally found out that I had been lacking ``-vo vdpau'' for quite a while. Cheers.


This silver ladybug at line 28...

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