Notices

I might have spoken too soon about mplayer being perfect on Diablo. I noticed last night that after ten minutes or so of video playback, it begins to drop frames. Quitting playback and resuming (thank §DEITY for that resume option!) fixes this -- for ten minutes.

I don't know whether this is my fault or not, but here are the particularities of my system:

- Diablo, last version;
- mplayer 1.0rc1-maemo.29.n8x0;
- Videos transcoded with "Nokia N800 Video Convert 0.84" at 400x240, 512 kbps video and 128 kbps audio (I tried with lower bitraes, but got no improvement);
- playing from (and this might be the culprit) a 4GB SD card, non-SDHC and rated (or rather printed on it) 150x speed. This card worked fine previously, with the occasional and familiar stutter in mplayer, and the rated speed appears to me plenty fast enough;
- no other application is running.

Has anyone noticed similar behaviour and/or (hopefully) a solution?

Similar problem here: I experimented with h.264-videos and found decent settings for the built-in media player. The same video is unwatchable in mplayer, video and sound stutter like hell and mplayer doesn't respond any more (or better: takes up to a minute to react to clicks/key presses).

I found it gets better when I reduce the bitrate even further, but it still isn't really good and I reach a level where video quality becomes bad. So given the fact that the built-in player has a better performance and a nicer UI, why should I bother getting mplayer to work?

That metalayer-crawler zombie b*st*rd makes for at least one argument...

Mind you, I'm not saying mplayer becomes unwatchable, merely that it begins to resemble my P910i at 15 fps.

RC1 doesn't handle wmv3 and h.264 too well.

I checked one of the transcoded files in Virtualdub and it reports "3ivx D4 4.5.1" as the video codec, but complains about variable audio rates. COuld any of these be the cause and if so, what encoder should I use?

I like N800 Video Convert because it's bloomingly fast.

maybe you should try to disable metalayer-crawler and see if there is any improvement. i get those stutters sometimes too, not only on videos but also on music. when i check the load applet it shows metalayer-crawler doing its thing.

thank you, metalayer-crawler for teaching me the virtue of patience.

RC2 is not better for H.264 either. MPlayer and FFmpeg do not have any ARM optimizations for H.264 yet. Have no idea about WMV3 because I don't have any such files and did not run benchmarks for it.

But that is not related to the original report. Slowdown after 10 minutes of playback sounds definitely suspicious. Does anybody else have this problem?

I tried the same video with a different transcoder, Konttori's Media Converter (v2.02). Unfortunately I found out afterwards that it defaults to the same codec (3ivx D4 4.5.1 -- what are the odds, eh?) and with the same result: Around minute 13 of a 25 minute video frames start dropping and audio gets ever so slightly choppy (the audio is a lot less annoying than the video, but it's definitely there).

Now, in fairness, this is a Penn&Teller ******** video, so it might just be that mplayer doesn't like the gratuitous swearing and rampantly unfunctional nudity. Still, I like it and I really wanna watch it, even if "jerkiness" gets a totally new meaning with boobs in the picture.

There are general optimizations though:

From RC2 changelog:

* support SVQ3 and H.264 in X-QT over RTSP, now RTSP Apple keynotes work
(live555)
* support H.264 over RTSP (live555)
* H.264 decoding speedup
* Slice-based parallel H.264 decoding (-lavdopts fast:threads=N)
* lowres support for some H.264 files

Have you confirmed performance improvement on ARM? What are the numbers from your benchmarks? I know that mplayer/ffmpeg got some nice x86 optimizations for H.264 and also now supports parallel decoding on multicore CPUs, but that does not have much value for internet tablets.

In any case, H.264 decoding from mplayer is still slow on ARM and very far from hardware capabilities limit.