grau:
Most likely MPlayer terminates because of the error in the config file. You can try to press 'Report' button to see detailed information about the last video playback attempt. If you recall a post from Tweak (http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...postcount=222), these lines should be added to input.conf file, but not to config. Hope this helps.

I can't run MPlayer
 

Hi all,
every time I try to run MPlayer, I have that small box with "MPlayer loading..." for few seconds and then nothing happens. Uninstall/Install does not help.
Any ideas?

TIA
-ioan

Try to run 'gmplauncher' from XTerminal instead of using menu and report what happens, it can provide some useful error messages in console.

Also you may want to try rebooting the device, it sounds dumb but this method already helped in some cases :) I nothing helps, please provide some additional information such as your IT2006 version, some information about your mmc card (its size, filesystem type, general directories layout), as mplayer gui scans mmc card for video files, it may have some problems on your device at this step. Also it is interesting whether you are using swap or not. With more details it will be easier to figure out what happens and make MPlayer work on your device.

~ $ gmplauncher
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:5853: Unable to locate image file in pixmap_path: "../images/qgn_plat_volume_bar_horizontal_regular_mute_button _disa bled_pressed.png"
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:5855: "Background" image options spe cified without filename
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:5867: Unable to locate image file in pixmap_path: "../images/qgn_plat_volume_bar_horizontal_regular_mute_button _disa bled_pressed.png"
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:5869: "Background" image options spe cified without filename
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:6048: Unable to locate image file in pixmap_path: "../images/qgn_plat_volume_bar_vertical_regular_mute_button_d isabl ed_pressed.png"
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:6050: "Background" image options spe cified without filename
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:6062: Unable to locate image file in pixmap_path: "../images/qgn_plat_volume_bar_vertical_regular_mute_button_d isabl ed_pressed.png"
/usr/share/themes/theme4-14pt/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:6064: "Background" image options spe cified without filename

so I suppose is because I use the 14pt theme...

Of course I rebooted, still nothing. I have a 2GB mmc, formated in fat32, I have a 24MB swap file... I don't have any video files on my mmc yet, I just wanted to run it to see the application and then maybe convert some videos.

Now one more question, do the MPlayer works with the xm online satellite radio broadcast? I think they broadcast in wma format, and the mime is video/x-ms-asf.

Thanks
-ioan

actually I think is the memory card (and/or swap file). If I take out the memory card, the MPlayer starts right away, if the card is in... nothing happens if I try to run the application.
I have the memory card almost full with maps for maemo-mapper, over 200k of map tiles... maybe the MPlayer is searching for videos on the mmc and just take time (lots of time) until starts? If this is the case, can you disable the option to search for video files?

Thanks
-ioan

hum... thanks for the answer, but I didn't find any other file. Besides, this oone had "Place here the codes you want to apply" (or something close) so I figured out that was it.

I'll keep looking, but thanks already fot your answer.

I don't recall input.conf being created by default, so you will probably need to make it yourself. For more options check the full documention on the mplayer site.

Yes, most likely. Scanning all these files can take quite a lot of time, I have only about several hundreds of files on MMC card, so GUI starts with almost no delay. Disabling automatic scanning for files can reduce usability as you will have to perform many extra operations just to open video files to start watching them. The goal of this GUI was simplicity, but looks like it fails when there are too many files. Maybe we can either restrict scanning for video files in some subdirectory on MMC card such as 'Videos'? One more option is to have some limit on MMC card scanning (limit either time or the number of files before giving up). Anyway comments about how to resolve such issue are welcome.

Don't know, it is better ot try it :) You can run mplayer from XTerminal by providing url in its command line.

By the way, I'm going to upgrade maemo mplayer package to upstream version 1.0rc1 on this weekend, it should have better flv and wmv support and also support some new other formats.

It would be good to provide a general directory-to-scan config option. As well as solving this start up time problem, it would also allow people (including me) to specify a directory on a different MMC partition.

- Neil

you got my vote, scanning just in one dir (and all subdirs) on the mmc is the best idea.

Thanks,
-ioan

I would appreciate if it scanned for audio files also.

(Listening to mp3's over cifs works well with mplayer but stutters when I use the inbuilt player.)

you should have entered that into a file called /home/user/.mplayer/input.conf instead of the config file.

A new release of MPlayer build for maemo is available. It was upgraded to upstream release 1.0rc1 and now has better FLV support. At least now I can't reproduce these lockup problems on some FLV files that were reported before. Audio delay can now be configured from the OSD menu. Also WMA playback should be supported now but as the decoder heavily uses floating point, only very low bitrates can be played normally (see http://maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-dev...er/006437.html).

There were no improvements for GUI due to lack of free time, also I'm not very good at GUI programming, so any help would be welcome :)

Forgot to mention that because of upgrading to a new upstream version, lots of things have changed/improved internally but we can expect more bugs. If you notice any regressions, please report them. Next releases should be much more stable.

I found this reference to a MPlayer front end in the Zaurus forums :

http://jdolan.dyndns.org/jaydolan/pymp.html

Could it be useful with the 770 version of MPlayer too ? Gtk2+Python sound like a good fit...

Thanks for this link, I already evaluated this frontend when considering what to use for MPlayer GUI on Nokia 770 (along with others from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html). It worked somewhat, but was not very usable and still needed a lot of tweaks anyway, in addition it has python as a dependency and that may be not very desirable. So current GUI was written from scratch and is specifically tuned for Nokia 770 (it matches my vision of best usability - requires minimum efforts to find and watch any video stored on mmc card and is also usable without stylus).

Surely, alternative GUI frontends (and improvements for the current one) are very much welcome. Don't forget about mplayer garage trackers, they can be used to submit bugreports, feature requests and patches, so that issue reports do not get lost in a long forum thread :)

Hello All,

A new version of maemo mplayer package (mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.4) now contains video output method which uses hardware YUV colorspace. For normal users it means that mplayer got some noticeable performance improvement and it can handle some more complicated and previously unwatchable videos better now :)

It is important to reboot your device after installing this new mplayer package for the new video output method to become active. Unless you reboot, you will just get the good old x11 and sdl video output methods just like in the older versions. Installer just adds 'user' to 'video' group, so that mplayer can access /dev/fb0 device, but unfortunately these changes take effect only after reboot.

Just like any release with some big improvements, this version is still considered experimental and may contain bugs. If you notice any issue, please report it here.

Also it is worth to mention that unlikely some other software for 770, mplayer is a standalone and nonintrusive package, so the risk of getting your system screwed up after installing it is extremely low :)

Just uploaded a new build (mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.5). It contains only a minor tweak which eliminates any need of rebooting the device after installing mplayer package. So now installing mplayer is just as easy as it was before :)

After playing with these new versions a bit more, I think that it is quite good and if no problems get reported in the next few days, it will be promoted to 'stable' and uploaded to garage extras repository. So feedback is very much appreciated.

I've been having a bunch of 'unresponsive' dialogs but I havin'g verified the culprit (recently did the maemo 2.1upgrade). Not enough info to report outside of this mentioning.

I cannot adjust the audio delay in the gui menu. I can highlight and select it, but no button actions will change it from zero.

The earlier key remapping I did to the input.conf now hard locks the entire system when pressing up or down.

Please clarify your report a bit. Do you see this 'unresponsiveness' problem when running MPlayer? Or you observe it even without touching MPlayer at all? One of the good things about MPlayer is that it is just a pair of executable files which do not try to integrate into gstreamer stack on the device or register itself there in some unusual way. Until you start MPlayer, it just takes some space on your flash but does not affect system in any way.

OK, I see, I'll try to check what's happening. But normally video & audio should be in sync anyway, and if you have a 'bad' file that is causing problems, it would be a good idea to have a look at it.

In addition, current mplayer version that is available from extras repository is likely to have the same bug, so replacing it with this latest mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.5 build will not introduce any regression ;)

With the new mplayer rc1.4 the video play quite faster, but sometimes (mostly) they have a strange flickering (!?) (i.e. sometimes´the underlying window shines through for some frames). After the video stops the are "black holes" in the windowborders, and other strange things (a nonfullscreen image of the end of the video in the top left windowcorner), which partly vanish after pressing ESC or closing the browserwindow.

I normaly use mplayer with a script which is called directly by clicking on a videolink in the builtin browser (opera). Are there any special parameters required in the new version (except -vo nokia770)?

(I already have rebooted since installation of rc1.4, so i thing a upgrade to rc1.5 shouldnt change anything, if i understood the changelog corretly)

When playing/lauching a dvd rip. This is the first time I've had the issue since you started this port. Once again, I just upgraded the os so I'm not sure if the culprit is mplayer or the newest kernel.


Minor notes:
..hitting the power switch (but doing nothing) seems to be problematic during playback.
..osd shows fullscreen=no even when FS.

That's probably a problem of mplayer losing focus, but keeping video playback using direct framebuffer access. So it interferes with other applications that try to display something on the screen (everything that gets into a rectangle used by mplayer for video playback will be overdrawn). MPlayer still needs to handle losing and getting focus better (switching to other applications and back).

Right now it is better not to switch to other applications while MPlayer is running and everything will be ok (or should be ok :)).

Just tested it with opera too, it seems to work fine here (unless you try switching back to opera before stopping MPlayer) :)

None special parameters are required, but '-vo nokia770' has some suboptions which can be used to tune it. You can set a screen area for video playback in a 'windowed' mode. For example '-vo nokia770:x=174:y=60:w=600:h=360' sets video output area for windowed mode to the dimentions used by default video player. It may be useful for 'slave' mode if somebody decides to implement exact clone of default video player using MPlayer as a backend.

Yes, it is only a tweak for the installer, so you can safely stay with version mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.4

As soon as I get some more spare time, I'll add some performance optimizations to the scaling code and video decoder in order to improve performance even more.

Please let us know if you encounter it again and if this issue is reproducible (preferably with the description of steps that can be used to reproduce it).

Thanks, by the way, it is possible to use garage trackers to submit MPlayer bugreports and feature requests: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mplayer/

And as you can see, many of them are resolved already ;)

thanks for your long answer.
Normaly i dont "switch back to opera", but sometimes the video just stops (with a smaller picture in upper left corner), so i thought the video is over and clicked somewhere (or pressed ESC (?)), so this might have switched to Opera.

Which options do you recommend for usage with opera?
Is it better to put the options directly in the script, which is called by opera, or should i better put theme somehow in .mplayer/config ?

Is it possible to see if mplayer is still starting up, when i clicked a link, or if it already crashed because the video was not playable or some other reasons keep mplayer from working correctly (i.e. to less memory or so).

Sometimes i thought the video will never start, closed the webpage, and shortly after this, a video starts.
Is it maybe somehow possible to use the "GUI-Mplayer" directly from opera, without cut/paste the link manually?

Thanks
bsterix

I'll try to make mplayer (command line binary, not a gui frontend) add some icon to the taskbar when it is running, that should solve some of the most annoying problems.

By the way, did this new mplayer package install fine for everyone? I could not test all the possible system configurations such as mistral or scirocco and r&d mode turned on or off. It should be easy to notice if the new video output code is working by looking into 'Report' after watching some video. You should see something like this there ('nokia770' video output driver and 'yuyv422' as target colorspace):
In the case of any troubles with accessing framebuffer, mplayer may fallback to x11 or sdl output drivers, it is not good for performance as nokia770 driver should be the fastest right now and is set to be used by default. So please report if mplayer refuses to use this new driver with yuyv422 colorspace on your system for some reason.

In addition, this new video output code has better scaling support. While using software scaling introduces some noticeable but not critical performance degradation for non-optimal resolutions, at least image quality is good. That means mplayer is less picky about video resolutions now.

when i play the discovery video i get no yuv

MPlayer 1.0rc1-maemo.5 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
CPU: ARM
Menu inited: /etc/mplayer/menu.conf

Playing /home/user/MyDocs/.videos/Discovery.avi.
AVI file format detected.
VIDEO: [DIVX] 352x208 24bpp 15.000 fps 389.5 kbps (47.5 kbyte/s)
Clip info:
Software: MEncoder dev-CVS-050626-17:02-3.4.2
================================================== ========================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffodivx] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-4)
================================================== ========================
================================================== ========================
Trying to force audio codec driver family dspmp3...
Opening audio decoder: [dspmp3] MP3 audio pass-through for Nokia 770 (fake decoder)
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, ??, 64.0 kbit/4.54% (ratio: 8000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [dspmp3] afm: dspmp3 (MP3 audio pass-through for Nokia 770)
================================================== ========================
AO: [null] 44100Hz 2ch ?? (1 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
VDec: vo config request - 352 x 208 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
Movie-Aspect is 1.69:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [nokia770] 352x208 => 352x208 Planar YV12 [fs]

Exiting... (Quit)

what might be the reason? with my old os2006 2.0 i thnk yuv worked. performance was quite good

bsterix: Everything is ok, having VO: [nokia770] in your log shows that mplayer uses proper video output code. Apparently mplayer just shows more information to console (including that swscaler details about target colorspace) when run from xterm or from ssh session. I'm sorry for posting somewhat misleading information.

When i start mplayer from xterm, everything ios as expected.

Thanks for the fast answer
bsterix

A new version of maemo mplayer (mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.6) is now available:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=54

It contains mostly bugfixes and usability tweaks based on the feedback from the previous version, release notes are here:

• Now MPlayer has an icon for its own window in the taskbar, so if you (accidently) switch to other application or press home button, you can easily get back :)
• Fixed a bug in gstreamer audio module which was causing freeze on trying to play next video/audio file (when specifying several files in the command line, using playlist or slave mode)
• Updated OSD menu config, added 'fast seek' option which should help with seeking in long movies

Now I hope that this version does not have any issues left that need immediate attention and it can promoted to stable for getting into extras repository. Please test it extensively and report any problems, your feedback is very helpful. Thanks in advance.

By the way, there is still a good potential for further performance improvements (scaling and video decoding can be optimized) and if bugfixing and other release management related issues don't eat all my free time, MPlayer will become even better at playing high bitrate/resolution movies soon :)

Thank you!!
 

@Serge and those who have pitched in on this project: Thank you! I can now watch full-length PAL movies ripped from DVD on my Nokia 770 at an excellent quality level. Thank you for all your hard work!

@Those just getting into it, here's what I (as a complete mplayer/mencoder noobie) did:

1. Downloaded mplayer and mencoder from here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu

2. Read through some of the mplayer/mencoder documentation. Most of it (as I know very little about the ins and outs of AV formats, codecs, and streaming) didn't necessarily soak in the first time, but it provides helpful background.

3. Ripped a PAL DVD to my hard drive so I could experiment without constantly re-reading it. (Details: mplayer and mencoder can read from a local directory as though they were reading from a DVD drive: Normally you'd supply "dvd://1" as the source path to play the first title on a DVD with mplayer. If you do that but also give it an additional "-dvd-device" parameter followed (after a space) by the path to the directory into which you ripped the DVD (the one with VIDEO_TS, etc.), mplayer and mencoder will read that directory just like reading a DVD. So for me, for instance, instead of just "mencoder dvd://1 etc" it was "mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device d:\dvds\testrip\video_ts etc".)

4. Experimented a lot with encoding 1-chapter excerpts with various settings and seeing how they played on the 770. Since I want the video full-screen and the device's little processor and DSP just can't handle doing 800x480, as Serge recommends I encoded at 400x240 so when I play it back mplayer can use the hardware pixel doubler to scale it up. My initial efforts produced very choppy movies, even if I lowered the video bitrate to the point where I was seeing quite bad pixellation. I kept at it, though, sure that there was something I was missing based on Serge and others being so pleased with their results, and sure enough -- at one point I was looking at mplayer's output (if you're not running from the command-line, the GUI has an excellent "Report" button you can click after playing the video to see mplayer's output), and finally saw something I'd missed before:

mplayer was having to scale the movie on-the-fly! And here I was trying so hard to avoid that. It was doing this because I'd encoded it at 400:240 (1.67:1), but the source movie is at the much more typical 1.78:1 -- and mencoder carried that information over into my encoded AVI file, and mplayer was trying to show me the movie in the correct aspect ratio.

This was readily fixed -- as I doubt my eye will really notice the difference in aspect ratio between 1.67:1 and 1.78:1. You can tell mencoder to include the aspect ratio in the output either by specifying "-lavcopts aspect=W/H" or by using "-lavcopts autoaspect". I was using the latter, having happily copy-and-pasted it from an example I found somewhere and not having examined what it meant. Encoding with "-lavcopts aspect=400/240" solves the problem.

[You can also fix this on playback by telling mplayer to ignore the aspect information: If you're running mplayer from the command line (in xterm, for instance), just add "-noaspect" to the command line. For me, since I probably never want it to scale for aspect ratio on playback, I added "noaspect=true" to /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf. (This is a bit harder than perhaps it should be, as it would appear that you can only change that file as root and many casual users won't know how to get root access. Maybe someday I'll have some free time and can add a configuration screen to the mplayer GUI to contribute back. Not going to happen in January, though. :( ) ]

The end result is that I can easily encode PAL DVDs to MPEG4 in two passes at 400x240, audio at 128kbps (since Serge got the hardware decoding working!), video at 500kbps, 25fps, and play them back very smoothly using mplayer's latest default options.

Here's how I'm encoding:
(Then I throw away Pass1.avi -- if you're using Linux, you can specify /dev/null instead of Pass1.avi.)

Of course, you can also use the automatic script(s) listed in other posts in this thread, but I wanted to know what was going on under the covers.

Thank you again, Serge & Co!!
--
T.J. Crowder
tj at crowder software dot com

Thanks for the detailed report. You raised an important potential issue with aspect ratio. We should at least check that the commonly used transcoding tools for Nokia 770 (770-encode.pl and Media Converter) handle this gracefully and ensure that no scaling would be used. As for using -noaspect by default, I'm not too sure, some videos may have a really strange aspect ratio that needs to be corrected.

By the way, you can use '/home/user/.mplayer/config' instead of '/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf' for adding your options. It is highly recommended to do so, as '/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf' gets overwritten with default options on any mplayer upgrade and you would lose your settings.

Also if you track garage news page, you probably noticed announce about kmplayer getting some initial mplayer support :)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Yeah, I agree about the aspect ratio thing -- mostly I want to ensure it's correct at transcoding time. If I forgot or something and it goes awry at playback, I can always drop into xterm and fix it.
Doh! Thanks again, Serge!

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Here is some experimental test .deb package for N800: http://ufo2000.xcomufo.com/maemo/mpl...ntal_armel.deb

It is just current SVN version configured with xv (N800 supports XV extension), compiler optimizations for armv6 and hardware floating point enabled. This package was not extensively tested and may contain bugs though.

Some more or less official packages will be available once we decide how to support both 770 and N800 devices efficienly on both source and binary package level.

Feedback about WMA/WMV support is especially welcome (as WMA decoder in MPlayer uses floating point math).

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Does the N800 actually have hardware floating point? I can't see any mention of it on the Ti page for the OMAP 2420. The only mention I can see is of VFP acceleration for the OMAP 3430.

Si

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Yes, it does. If you look at /proc/cpuinfo information, you will notice vfp in features. That mplayer test package for N800 was built with vfp support, so it theoretically should be usable with codecs that are using floating point math in ffmpeg/mplayer (WMA, AC3, AAC). Now we only need to wait for some happy N800 owner to test this build with WMV video and report results :)

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Ah, cool. I stand corrected.

Will be interesting to see what fp results it produces compared with the softfloat implementation.


Si

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

Serge, the version you just posted seems to be running fine on my N800. I tested it with the Nokia included clip about the N93, a Xvid encoded full-length movie and a mpeg1 encoded music video.

Re: MPlayer which version is suitable
 

I can also confirm that some vids i converted from DVD using Handbrake on OS X run fine on the N800 using MPlayer. The pre-installed media player will not recognize them, whereas they were fine on the 770 within the default video app. Interesting.