Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I just installed and tried the latest build on my N800. Great work! The tearing is reduced quite a bit and the playback is smoother now. I've been testing on the same set of videos, so its noticable. Keep up the good work!

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I just updated to the new version, tearing is really much better.
I also converted some movies and recognized something interesting according to my sync problem. Again, there is a movie which is out of sync, every time. I tried many bitrate settings, and only 32kbit audio works well, indipendent of the video bitrate. According to mplayer -identify on the original file, it is 160kbit mp3 so it is constant. Maybe that's some kind of a hint.

Again, great work on the mplayer project, serge :)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Those who are using MPlayer to watch videos on N800 (if such people exist) should wait with upgrading to the new firmware a bit. The latest build of MPlayer does not work there. The older build (mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.9) that used Xv for video output still randomly gets stuck with it. I'll try to provide more details (and probably a fix) a bit later.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Just flashed my N800 and mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.11.800 works if I run mplayer -vo xv or -vo sdl.
The downside is that there's alot of stuttering and dropped frames in high motion scenes. But there's no tearing at all :)
DivX 512x384 @ 1000kbps 30fps (guess the fps is to high)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Wow, that's a big movie! Have you tried lower rates and resolutions with this settings? I guess it's time to reinstall mplayer. I just deinstalled it, cause it won't work with the new firmware(out of the box)...

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I'm copying another movie to my N800, don't know how to make clips, so I have to copy the whole thing and my SD card is slow as hell, be back in about 15 minutes

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Juhe, I am waiting :)
Btw: Now that I now what params to set, to make mplayer work somehow, I could test it on my own... will be back in about 10 Minutes :D

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

woow, works really good. I tried a movie, which I tried today before flashing. Maybe I just imagine that, but it seems to have better performance. Tearing is also NULL.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Did a test encode of a fighting scene from fearless, xvid @ ~1000kbps vbr 400x160 23.975 fps.
The whole clip is high motion and there's absolutly no tearing and no dropped frames/stuttering. I'll do some more experiments with higher resolutions and bitrate.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

1000kbps is already high enough, I think. I recode my Movies to 512kbps :-S

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Well i got greedy and tried out 592x240, didn't work well at all :)
Guess I'll just stick with 400x160.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Can anybody confirm jamming (sometimes showing old frames so that video seems to play backwards for a moment resulting in very jerky playback) and lockups (cycling between two sequential frames infinitely) on high resolution widescreen movies with '-vo xv' video output (or "vo = xv" in /home/user/.mplayer/config)?
I tried two of such movies and both failed to play properly:
1. 512x288 23.976 fps 838.2 kbps
2. 640x360 23.976 fps 839.9 kbps
Both of them played just file with the previous firmware and '-vo nokia770' video output. Can you see anything like this or I'm the one unlucky here?

I would be glad to switch to xv, but this problem will have to be fixed. Otherwise it defeats the purpose of having mplayer installed on the device - to watch normal nonconverted divx/xvid movies.

Now I'm waiting for the kernel and xserver sources of the new firmware to become available in order to see what can be done.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

512x288 23.975 fps peaks at above 1000kbps, did set it to 838 CBR, wtf?
Anyways in som parts the playback is jerky and eventually there's a lockup.
There was also some tearing in the lower part of the screen.

Same clip @ 640x360, same problem and it seems like the tearing appears when the amount of motion in the clip, reaches above a certain point.

Hope this will help, I have to admit that I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to video encoding/recoding.

UPDATE: With -vo sdl there's no stuttering or tearing, but it's slooooooow

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I copied my non converted movie files to the device.
I used the -vo xv parameter.
Movie 1): 624x352 XVID - approx. 1000kbs - 25fps
It is very choppy and laging, but there is absolutely no tearing.
In normal scenes I would guess about 8fps, it goes down to about every 2 seconds one frame in heavy action scenes, but again no tearing, even no out of sync. I tried to see some "backwards moving" frames, it just lags. But not constant, even in scenes where there is about the same movement in a long enough time period, it stops for about 0.5 -1 second, then plays some frames with much higher rates, then stops again 0.5-1 second and again frames with higher rates for approx. 1 second. But there are no loops or backward moving, as far as I could see it. In lower actions scenes, the laging is rather constant.

Movie 2): XVID 576x320 - 1100 kbps - 25fps
Hard to say, cause I got one frame every 5 seconds. The movies starts with approx. 8 fps for about 3 seconds and then goes down to one frame every 5 seconds.

I have Movie 1) in a recoded format: 400x240 - 512kbps - 25fps - 96kbit audio.
It works great, nearly 100% smooth and flawless. The same movie had a little trouble one day ago on the older firmware. In a little more complicated scenes it just laged nearly periodically. There are scenes where the "Odyssey" from SGC (Stargate ;) ) flys from one corner to the other. On the older firmware it was literaly a jumping. Now it's very smooth.

Funny thing: Movies that are out of sync on mplayer are synced in media player. Movies that are out of sync in media player are synced in mplayer. The other ones are synced both in mplayer and media player :)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Another update of MPlayer which works with the second version of N800 firmware is available (mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.12.800). It uses Xv for video output, some tweaks were required to fix stability issues, but now it seems to run ok.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Can anybody do me a fovour and test the latest version of MPlayer on the first N800 firmware as I don't have it anymore? I wonder if the latest Xv fixes help there as well (long moderate resolution videos should play without jamming). If we get a confirmation that it works even there, this latest build can be promoted to stable and uploaded to extras repository. So we might have reached a new milestone already.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I just tested it using a file: Video Codec DX50, Video Bitrate 683kbps, Resolution 400x224, Audio Codec dspmp3, Audio Bitrate 128kbps, Audio Samples 44.1kHz 2CH, two hour movie transcoded using Handbrake from a DVD @24fps.

Good news: Perfect playback even with high action scenes, no tearing, absolutely smooth (same for the built-in media player, btw).

Not so good news: Any seeking jams/hangs/crashes MPlayer.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

EDIT: I can't read! :eek: Anyway, my feedback still might be useful, I hope!

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Great work Serge! I watched a half-hour show, xvid at 700kbps 400x304 and it was wonderful. No stutters, hangs, or blips in the sound despite a lot of motion and pans.

Larry

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Has anyone else tried the Nokia_N800.avi (came with updated OS) with mplayer?
When I play the clip I get tearing across the lower part of the screen, but not with the native media player.
Serge: thanks for all the work you have done, you are doing a great job!!

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I am unable to use Mplayer with the latest firmware.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Would you be so kind to share at least some details?

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Sure.... I get only a black screen... I here the sound but no video...
The vidoe play just fine in the mameo video player but not on mplayer...

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

So which video codec are you using? Everything plays fine here (perfectly, actually). The only problem I can see is I can't seem to seek...

Cheers

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Yes, I noticed that there are quite a handful of movies played in MPlayer with this tearing line while they are ok in the standard player. I don't know why it could be so as MPlayer now uses Xvideo extension just like the standard player. On the other hand, some videos also have this tearing line in the standard player (a test video I have transcoded to 512x288 24fps 800kbps). I'll have a closer look at this problem once the new sources of xserver become available.

Also MPlayer seems to play higher resolution and bitrate videos smoother than the standard player, not to mention support of more codecs. So if you don't want to transcode your videos and want to play them as is, you have better chances with MPlayer.

Yes, I also noticed this problem on N800. If you keep hitting rewind button frequently, it sometimes jams (most likely because of some issues with gstreamer usage), but I have never seen crashes yet. In order to use rewind in MPlayer, it is better to do it using single key presses: you press a key, mplayer jumps to some other part of movie and start playing it, you press the key again and so on... If MPlayer got stuck, pressing the middle key on arrowpad twice can help. Hope this helps. And I'll try to investigate and fix this issue later.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

It helps greatly, thanks! And I've found that the +-10min Fast Seek makes a big difference too...Cheers

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

every time i play a video and it is reaching the end, the mplayer just automatically fowards or fastens the video around the last 17 to 20 seconds of the video. is there a setting that i need to put to make the video play smoothly at the beginning and END! or is there something else wrong

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.12.800 looks pretty good on 3.2007.10-7, just the following issues:

1. Seek fwd/rew causes a hang (you already know this)
2. Audio delay in the menu isn't working - not able to change the delay value
3. MP4 no longer plays correctly - this seems to have been broken since 1.0rc1-maemo.11 as it worked fine in 1.0rc1-maemo.9 (or maybe it was .10).

I can send you the MP4 if you like - it's the demo video from a SonyEricsson W950i phone. It now plays as static/white noise in mplayer.12 and plays just fine in the stock 3.2007.10-7 Media Player.

I've also noticed significant audio sync problems with mplayer that do not occur in Media Player.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Hi All,

The N800 and N93 videos seem to play worse in this latest version. Jerky and slight tearing I think.

As for other videos that I encoded using Media Converter @ 400x200 768kbps & Audio at 32 kbps, works well. Video @ higher audio bitrates seem to go offsync with the video slightly. I think audio at 32 kbps seems to be the most robust at the moment. Hope this helps in the diagnosis...let me know if you need more details.


Luke

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

The problem with the N800 and N93 videos is that the aspect ratio is slightly off. If you start mplayer from xterm with the option -noaspect or add noaspect=true to ~/.mplayer/config they will play smooth.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Thanks, that's an interesting observation. Looks like it explains the difference between the built-in player and mplayer (mplayer respects aspect ratio, so you see some small black bands above and below the video). It is strange that Xv starts to suffer from it so much though.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

A new build mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.13.800 was just released:
* Some workaround for N800 that should reduce or eliminate hangs when seeking
* Bugfix for alignment problem in ASF files

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Thanks for the file, checked it. It contains AAC audio track. Currently MPlayer does not use DSP codec for AAC and uses its own code for it. The AAC decoder from MPlayer is not optimized for ARM currently, moreover it uses floating point math in default configuration. It is possible to configure it to use fixed point math, but fixed point decoder is much less stable and it even does not support one of the AAC variants. As N800 has vfp, I configured AAC decoder to use floating point math, but it is still too slow to play this file.

It is all about priorities. Surely, AAC playback can be improved (maybe using DSP decoder), but it requires quite a lot of work. In the mean time fixing or improving something else might be better. Right now MPlayer is optimized for mpeg4 video (and variants such as divx,xvid,flv,etc.) and mp3 audio on Internet Tablets. Also there will be always media formats (mostly proprietary and closed source) which are supported by built-in player, but very poorly supported or not supported at all in mplayer, real media files for example. It is generally better to avoid such media files if possible, as they are an evil thing and may bite you in the future (think about the possibility of the company behind this format getting out of business and upgrade to some new hardware/os with no codecs to support this format any longer).

As for the bugs, their fixes and stabilization of MPlayer on N800. We need to decide what is important for us, what needs to be fixed ASAP, and what can wait a bit longer. Hint: bugtracker at MPlayer garage project page works and the bugs which are reported there actually get fixed :)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

can someone help me how to set mplayer to display subtitles in cyrillic?

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

You need to add a line 'subcp=cp1251' (without quotes) to /home/user/.mplayer/config file on your device

The information that was supposed to be enough for changing subtitles charset is available at the bottom of maemo mplayer home page. If you had some troubles understanding it, please explain what exactly was hard for you, we may try to improve that part on the website.

Surely, it would be better to have subtitles charset (and other options) configurable from GUI, but we still did not find a volunteer who would like to do that.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

thanks for the tip, works great! i'm new to linux so it was a little hard for me to set up the whole thing alone. now thanks to a friend of mine everything is allright.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Serge - no worries about the mp4 file, it was just one of those files I had lying around and it formed part of my "test suite" but isn't something I need to watch or a format I would encode to in future (it's a file I grabbed it off my phone).

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

The new release of MPlyaer is great!
Just wondering how to make RTSP streaming work with MPlayer ? Is the Live555 module easy to be compiled with MPlayer ? Any hints where to start to port the Live555 to N800 for Mplayer ?

Thanks!
Kc

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Can those who had problems with audio/video synchronization on some files test these files with the latest version mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.14.800 again and report results? I have rewritten mp3 audio passthrough fake decoder to make audio/video work better with variable bitrate audio. On the other hand, that's relatively a lot of changes, so testing is required to ensure that nothing else got broken. Please don't hesitate and report any problems.

PS. As soon as N800 package gets into a good shape and we ensure that it has no (major) problems remaining, I'm going to release an updated Nokia 770 package as well.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Seems to be an improvement Serge - thanks! It's definately better with videos that had audio sampled at 44.1khz, these would always go out of synch with mplayer and - after testing for only a few minutes - they now seem to stay in synch. :)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

It will probably work fine if compiled in. Looks like MPlayer requires installing external dependency for Live555 support. I have no experience with RTSP streaming, so I don't know how it should work and how to test it though.
If you want to try compiling your own build of MPlayer for maemo, you can checkout sources from garage mplayer SVN and run either 'make deb-n800' or 'make deb-n770' in scratchbox. All the configuration options can be found in 'debian/rules' file.