Arch Linux

TemplarGR

Member

From: Athens, Greece

Registered: 2009-12-16

Posts: 61

Problem in playing some H.264 videos, various players crushing.

My problem is that when i try to play some HD videos, the player crushes after some certain points in the movie. For example when i try to view Fight Club 1080p encoded with x264, every player i use crushes after showing the 20th Fox intro, after showing some credits, and at certain points further in the movie.

This happens with vlc, smplayer, dragon player etc. So this is not a specific player problem. This only happens in higher bitrate videos, i have no problem with lower bitrate videos.

My system is a Q6600 with 4 GBram, and a Radeon HD3870. I am using the git versions of mesa and xf86-video-ati.

Any ideas on what might be causing the problem?

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Problem in playing some H.264 videos, various players crushing.

My problem is that when i try to play some HD videos, the player crushes after some certain points in the movie. For example when i try to view Fight Club 1080p encoded with x264, every player i use crushes after showing the 20th Fox intro, after showing some credits, and at certain points further in the movie.

This happens with vlc, smplayer, dragon player etc. So this is not a specific player problem. This only happens in higher bitrate videos, i have no problem with lower bitrate videos.

My system is a Q6600 with 4 GBram, and a Radeon HD3870. I am using the git versions of mesa and xf86-video-ati.

Any ideas on what might be causing the problem?

I can tell you what's wrong. Up until recently nearly all decoding engines for Linux have sucked badly. The situation is improving slightly right now, but for many it's still out of reach.

I don't know much about ATI right now, so you could look into whether your card and the driver that you use support VAAPI. In that case you may be able to get hardware decoding working. Other than that, you can try one of the Mplayer mt (multi-threaded) builds or Mplayer with coreavc support from AUR.

GogglesGuy

Member

From: Rocket City

Registered: 2005-03-29

Posts: 610

Website

Re: Problem in playing some H.264 videos, various players crushing.

Perhaps it is a badly encoded file. I haven't had much problems playing HD content.

TemplarGR

Member

From: Athens, Greece

Registered: 2009-12-16

Posts: 61

Re: Problem in playing some H.264 videos, various players crushing.

No content is fine. It plays fine on windows so this is a specific linux problem. Skottish is probably right, it might be a decoder problem in which case i can do nothing about it .

Thanks for your opinions!

vinneh

Member

Registered: 2010-02-24

Posts: 15

Re: Problem in playing some H.264 videos, various players crushing.

Did you install vlc-git-va?  It's the version that has gpu acceleration enabled.

JohannesSM64

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2009-10-11

Posts: 623

Website

Re: Problem in playing some H.264 videos, various players crushing.

I'd call it an ATI problem rather than a Linux problem. Never had any problem decoding anything with nVidia