Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

Just picked up an n810 and love it. One issue I'm having is my collection of mp4 videos are not playing back as smoothly as I'd hoped. I've seen many links on how to recode my files to a more acceptable resolution, but I'm done with changing my files. Instead, I'm willing to suffer a bit in resolution or image quality during playback if I can make these changes on the player.

I've had experience with this before. I've got a Palm Life Drive that with TCPMP can play anything I throw at it full screen full speed (400 mhz proc), however, I'll take the same SD card and place it in my wife's Palm T|X and it will drop frames like crazy (333mhz proc). It's not a problem though, since I can change the settings to a lower quality (the image looks blockier) and still have full rate full screen video.

So I'm asking if anyone knows how to change playback settings in mplayer or any player that will allow for smoother playback at the cost of resolution or something. Thanks (and please do not tell me to reconvert my files!)

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

MPlayer will not play mp4 videos well (h.264 codec). It it missing armv6 assembly optimizations for it, which is quite a bit of work and needs to be done by somebody. Moreover, armv6 optimizations are not the best for mpeg4 asp (dixv/xvid) either, and these types of files could also play a lot better if somebody took care of this.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

short of playing the video with no sound, I know of nothing.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

What's the resolution and bitrate of the videos ?

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

mplayer is one of my favorite NIT apps.

When the new Fremantle device comes out, there will be approximately 2.5 years worth of armv6 maemo devices out there. These devices, the N800 and N810, will continue to be an inexpensive way to own a handheld Linux computer for some time, and they have an ideal form factor (small body, big screen, removable storage) for being a PMP.

Also, mp4 is on the rise, videos will continue to get bigger, and the cortex a8 could benefit from armv6 optimizations, too.

All this is to say that it really seems like a good investment to get mplayer's internals up-to-date (1.0 rc2), and get it optimized for armv6.

Is there nobody who can do this?

Also, if you're trying to play big files, try mplayer with the following command line parameters, see if it makes any difference:

you can also try lowres=2 for even lower resolution.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

qole mentioned the "-lavdopts lowres=1" command-line flag above. It can do wonders for playback smoothness, at the expense of visual quality.

You can add a line like "lavdopts=lowres=1,400" to mplayer's config file (should be "/home/user/.mplayer/config") to make mplayer automatically decode all videos greater than 400px wide at reduced resolution.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

OK, looks like I panicked a bit with my first post. Sorry, and you have all been golden with the responses. It seems most of my XVID or DIVX library is playing nicely. The hiccups come in files over 640 x 360, or files at 29.97 frames/second, or files with greater than 900 kbps. Also anything in h.264 is playing in slow motion, and mpeg1 files have no video (though I have very few of those and do not mind re-coding).

I tried the parameters qole mentioned and oddly enough it made the videos play back larger than the screen area, so I only saw the top left quarter of the video. However, these did point me in the right direction ( I should have fired up x-term and tried mplayer and observed all of the switches or commands I could try in the first place sorry)

So … again thanks for the tips, I’m not nearly the panic I was earlier and for now I suppose I’ll just recode my h.264 videos into xvid.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

If you like watching your videos at home, you could try different programs that allow you to stream them and do transcoding on-the-fly.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

If you find better command line parameters, please post them here.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

Sadly I have not found any settings that let me play back my h.264 files with any decency. All files play a bit better in mplayer launched from xterm rather that a GUI front end. This is especially true for Canola2. Great media app for everything but really chops up my video playback.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

Back when I was trying to playback bbc iplayer content (h264
480x272 + aac) i could only get decent playback by playing in b&w
using "mplayer -lavdopts gray" possibly combined with some of the other
switches mentioned above. not ideal but watchable.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

This may sound weird, but try to avoid 2 pass encodings. With 2 pass, the more action packed scenes get more bitrate, and they cause more dropped frames. At least if (like me) you prefer artifacts to dropped frames.

I'm getting good results (without too much lavdopts magic) from about 240x240 anamorphic at 250kbps. That's pretty smooth (if you can live with the resolution) except in the most intensive scenes. More resolution or bitrate lowers the fluidity pretty quickly :(

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

I've found recoding to the n800 dropping frame-rate to 15fps doesn't make a massive difference to perceived quality but does decrease file size and reduce data rate considerably! Zooming a 400x240 to full (wide)screen at 15fps works pretty well for me.

Re: Change settings for Video Playback in Mplayer
 

I seem to be getting good results with this configuration (in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf) for various DIVX and XVID files: