There's a lot of useful info in this thread, but there's also a lot of outdated info too.

I certainly got confused - still am to some extent.

A good solution would be for Serge (and/or other regular posters in this thread) to put a link to Serge's Wiki page with the latest advice and settings in their signatures so that pointer is well publicised.

It would be even better if the nice person who takes the time to do the summary did it as a Howto page in the Wiki. Forums are not good for this use because the summary itself will get lost in the thread and out of date. It is easier for everyone to just refresh the Wiki page with new information and point new users to it.

I've red all the tread ( not all the post, sure, cause some or them are too much tecnic for me, i'm a completly newbie to the linux world, but i've red most of them... ) . I got to start xterm, make it work, lerned how to list files and move the mplayer in the right dir in the memory. Than i din't read that you must put option between the player and the avi... i'm sorry to disappoint you...

About the " confusion" or " rumor " that i would have created making that question, i think that you triple it, by responding that way, and all the post that came after. Thx bytheway for replys.

Maybe :) I simply couldn't resist. My bad. Sorry. But I still think everything was already written about the 'permission denied' problem you asked. I thought there was simply no possible reply that would help you and best and fastest for you is to read it again.

HTTP streaming success!

I've found that if you encode video as:

Nx240 or 400xN (i.e. scaled to fit precisely into a 400x240 box, but not adding borders or stretching the picture)

25fps

150kbps video (2-pass mpeg4)

96kbps audio (mp3lame)

...then put the resulting AVI file onto a webserver onto my home network (the server's connected by wire to my wireless router) I can stream full-screen video via HTTP to my Nokia 770 using the following command:

mplayer -framedrop -fs -vo x11 -ao sdl -cache 800 http://servername/dir/file.avi

OK, so it means re-encoding a lot of stuff (200kbps video was very stuttery and jumpy), but the movie plays back smoothly and the sound quality is good and in synch.

(EDIT: I'm guessing that if you keep the total bitrate below 250kbps, you might be able to get better video quality at the expense of audio, but I haven't investigated that)


I'm quite pleased :)

For some more scientific benchmarking you can use -benchmark option for mplayer and measure time and cpu load for different mplayer options and different types of video :)

If you want to check whether some video can be played smoothly, add -noframedrop option, with this option mplayer will complain when it is not fast enough to play this video without dropping some frames.

By the way, probably 2-pass encoding is not the best choice for smooth playback on the resource limited device. It will make some parts of video use lower bitrate than you specified, but some parts will use higher bitrate and may become too heavy for cpu. So if you don't care too much about file size and want a smooth playback, 1-pass encoding is a way to go.

Ta for the tip Serge - I'm still experimenting, and will report my findings here.

I've found out that by dropping the audio bitrate to 64kbps, I can increase the video bitrate to the point where it starts dropping frames whilst keeping the audio smooth and in synch (VBR changed up to 300kbps).

Will do more scientific tests from now on now that I know how :)

My tests (with -vo x11 -fs -ao gst -ac dspmp3 options):

* mpeg4@400x224x25fpsx250kbps+mp3@128kbps=> 90-100% CPU
* h264@300x240x12fpsx250kbps+mp3@128kbps=> 90-100% CPU
* flv/mpeg1@300x240x25fpsx250kbps+mp2@128kbps=> 50-70% CPU

2Serge: Not all of these videos can be played by N770 default player. But the playable ones don't stress CPU (< 25%) as mplayer does. Can we hope in future a low-cpu-loading mplayer version, using DSP also for video?

In the meantime, thanx Serge for your job!

Well one of the main points why to have this mplayer is to not to use dsp for video because it is overused and cannot cope with higher bitrates/framerates together with decoding mp3 audio. If you want this just use the default video player by Nokia. I think the answer to your question is no.

However it would be interesting to add ogg support to default video and audio player (=to gstreamer) as described on maemo.org here http://www.maemo.org/platform/docs/m...g_started.html . This can move audio decoding to main CPU if you encode it as ogg and thus let DSP decode video a bit faster. But this would not solve problem that the dsp video codecs are a bit picky.

Forget about H.264. This device is not capable and benchmarking it is a complete waste of time.

What settings are you using for 'mpeg4'? QPEL? GMC? What is the spacing of your Iframes?

IMHO MP4 is best suited to this device in terms of capability to play back the video at decent compression ratios.