Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Hi

Does anybody know if videos have to be re-encoded in order to play nicely in MPlayer?

Rushmore, based on your experience, have you noted any differences between playing a video that has the optimal (854x480) resolution and another one that hasn't?

Thanks!

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Plays most standard xvids on the the web/torrent sites without any issues for me.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

No you shouldn't have to however I find re-encoding to the 800x480 screen size and also changing the VBR makes for smoother play back and smaller file sizes.

format wise, it plays just about anything and everything under the sun :D

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

except of some .MKVs
with h264 video- and ac3 (448 kbps) audio-codec.
resolution is 720 x 576 with 1300 kbps.

sound is playing nearly normal but the video lags big time. :(

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Why would you use 448kbps on audio?

I use h264 with no problems. Then again I use different settings then what you have posted.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

i forgot to say that i have not converted this file for the n900.
these are my settings for my pc and beamer with 5.1 audio for my surround system.

i don't want to convert these files again. maybe i could just convert the audio to a lower rate. vlc should work for that - but that's time which i don't want to waste converting something for my phone. :/

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Ah that makes sense then. I am so use to converting for my phone back in the S60 days so I am just accustome to doing it.:D

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

damn.
just deleted the audio completely but it's still slow as hell.
i think the video bitrate with 1300 kbps is much too high at this resolution and with the h264 codec and it's compression. :(

so there's no other way for me than converting all of my movies if i want to have them with me. dough! :(

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

while bitrate is important, so are the encoding settings used for H264, the N900 really only supports the most basic profile (3.0) it seems to play files with some of the more advanced settings outside of 3.0 but it causes it to lag because the amount of work necessary to decode it.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

tested another mkv with lower resolution and bitrate:

video: x264, 1240 kbps, 720 x 304
audio: ac3, 384 kbps

audio plays just fine. video is too slow but not as bad as in my first mkv-try.

will test if it runs better without audio (but i think audio isn't a huge problem at all?!)

EDIT: ok. without audio it's nearly normal speed. maybe some little tweaks to this and i don't have to convert this video. :D

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Use like 128kb/s AAC instead of AC3 and again make sure your not using any advanced H264 settings. Not sure what the bitrate limit is for the N900.

I just got MPlayer installed and it lagged badly for a video file that otherwise plays fine in the default N900 media player, so it seems its not nearly as good at decoding H264 for some reason.

So the best possible solution right now is to use the default player for H264 files, I am only using MPlayer for older Mpeg files that the default player will not play (music videos I have from long ago)

If you about to say "the default player cant play the file" try to use the extra codec support package it should fix it and let mkv play and some other stuff.

Also if .mkv is the only problem, its only the container not the format of the files inside it takes all of 2 minutes to repackage them into a .MP4 file so they play in the default player.

Dont know how? ask me for a tutorial :D if enough people need it I will take the time to write it up.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

what a pitty the default player doesn't even start to play the file. it throws an error as soon as it's loaded. :(

signed.
it seems that in everything else than h264 mplayer performs much better than the default player.

oh, crystal ball ftw ;)
but i have to say that i have installed the extra codec support package. there's quoted that most mkv-videos won't play yet.

right.
that's what i have done.
i packed it in .avi and .mp4 - the default player starts the video but it's just image LAAAAAAAAAAG image LAAAAAAAAAG and so on.
the bitrate-resolution-codec-combination is what is far from something that the players (in this state) can do.

thanks for offering.
but the only interesting for me would be to know which maximum settings in video/audio the players are able to screen. ;)

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Well off hand I only have 2 files I encoded myself and here are the stats:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_nNcVLzdKf-c/S1...20Settings.jpg

The left file is smooth as butter in the default player, absolutely no flaws or lag or sync issues. Even seeks well.

The right file is a tad too high, there is the occasional small studder but it actually plays pretty well.

I tried the right file on MPplayer and it almost did play at all it was so laggy, it took like 10 seconds to start playing and it lagged so bad only saw a few frames at a time and the audio was way out of sync.

The left file in MPlayer played right away with no horrible skipping but it was like slow motion, with micro studdering. Audio was out of sync within seconds due to video running slower than the audio.

So my guess is somewhere between the two around 1000-1200kb/s would be good for video bitrate for max quality without lag issues in default player but you need even lower than both for MPlayer

I have to say even my left file there looks just as good as the right side one, with this low of a resolution a super high bitrate is not needed to retain optimal quality.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

in respect of the aspect ratio of the original video source it would be cool to encode with either 854px width or 480px heigth.
a bitrate about 1200 kbps sounds good for video.
codec - mhm - x264 within avi-container or mp4-video within mp4-container.
fps at least about 20.

the audio quality isn't good at all imho.
so i would choose ac3 for avi or aac for mp4.
bitrate way lower - about 128 kbps.

but i'm too lazy right now for transcoding one of my videos. ^^

maybe i find some time and mood later. *smile*

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

I think there is some problems with audio:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6834

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

The size of the video is the size I obtained the videos at, I would only resize if it was larger than 800px wide, but these were already lower than 800 so thats the original size.

I always use AAC its far better than AC3 IMO and for all we know the N900 may have issues with AC3 and that could be lending a hand to your issues. I have listened to AAC all the way from 32kb/s up to 300+ and I can say that it works supremly well in low bitrate, even 64kb/s sounds great for movies and stuff, but just out of habit I do 128+ for anything music related to make sure I keep a high quality level. Both of those are music videos and I was just testing so I used a high bitrate for the AAC track.

"codec - mhm - x264 within avi-container or mp4-video within mp4-container."

That makes no sense.... never put H264 inside AVI, just dont do it, its not fully supported and a bad idea in general. .MP4 is a container you cant put "mp4 video" in a .mp4. Mpeg4? (AVC) MPEG4 AVC is actually H264.

Another thing that may/may not be effecting performance is the extra decoders pack. I do not have that installed, if it changes the default codec for the built in player, it may be a codec that lowers performance on H264, perhaps the same one MPlayer uses? and its very clear to me from testing that MPlayer is not playing my test files nearly as well as the default player is.

Again reminder use only basic 3.0 H264 profile for encoding, if your just repacking a .mkv chances are VERY high that it has a advancedd profile because most people using .mkv are doing it for the advanced properties .mkv contains and doing it for computer use not mobile device use so for those files a full recode is probably needed and not just a repacking.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

oh, i just used the denotation from vlc, sorry. it's not professional i know. ^^
but you're right. after all i read i would go for MP4 container with AVC and AAC. this seems the best choose for gstreamer.

(i tried x264 in avi because mkv doesn't work at all with the default player for me and mp4 seems to have issues too. seems i had luck that i worked pretty well. ^^)

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Well cool and good luck, another thing that occured to me as I was walking around is that you may and probably have the AC3 as multi channel still, most dvd and stuff use 5.1 AC3 the N900 is probably having to change that to 2 channel that may be using more cpu power, especially that ridiculously high bitrate you had for it.

AAC does now support multi channel so it can be a direct replacement for AC3, the only time I would keep AC3 music is if I plan to put it back on a DVD at some point in time for regular DVD playback.

it may be a good idea to check out a few google hits for AC3 vs AAC

One of my first results netted me this address: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=138571

and in there I saw this helpful quote:
Doom9 and Hydrogen Audio are both great sources for knowledge about encoding and stuff. I learned most of what I know from places like that as many of the program developers post there so you can get the knowledge about whats best right from the source.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

thanks for the hints.

maybe i will make a few transcoding attempts later. :)

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Alright, let us know your results and you can PM me if you need help.

Im gonna be working for the next few hours, I killed off all my downtime for tonight.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

container: MP4
video: MPEG-4, 720 x 576, 1200kbps, 20fps
audio: AAC, 44100Hz, 128kbps

plays fine in gstreamer and mplayer.
but i can't get gstreamer to zoom... :/

will end up in about 1.5gb for a 2h movie.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

I am home from work and did a full DVD --> N900 conversion.

Ripped movie Predator with DVDFab 6 to main movie only directly into its AC3 & VOB format.

I encoded it with MeGUI with the Iphone preset and also cropped off the top/bottom black areas.

Just so happens the iphone preset is exactly what I was going to manually set, its baseline 3.0 x264 settings with a 1000kb/s bitrate 2 pass method.

I used NeroAAC for audio 96kb/s LC encoding.

I muxed together with MP4box into a MP4 Container.

Put it on the N900 and the file looks fantastic and played perfect on Gstreamer, however It still has minor lag and slowdown in MPlayer. This confirms my earlier test that the ~700kb/s music video I had slowing down was not a low enough bit rate for MPlayer to keep in sync.

These are the settings I am going to stick with, its really high quality and kept the movie under 1GB, as my collection grows I may lower the bitrate more for the sake of file size as H264 scales down very very well I could probably cut the bitrate down to 500kb/s with minimal loss of quality esp on that small screen.

My work folder looked like this:
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/316/predatorw.jpg

so the question now is what movie comes next?? Im thinking monty python quest for the holy grail :D

Also almost never will I have time or ability to watch a full movie so I am thinking stuff like family guy episodes, short and funny.

heck I dont think the N900 battery will last 2 hours watching a movie unless its full because my phone almost just died on me and I charged it last night.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

your settings sound really good.

i wouldn't go down with the bitrate too much.
800 kbps at least. i'll go with 1000 kbps.
(but you can try 500 kbps and post here if it still looks fine)

one thing would be to lower the fps from 23 to 20.
so the file size would be smaller too.

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

just wonder what exactly is the n900 default media player.
have some files not detected by the media centre and also not detected by file explorer. So i am thinking of lauching the default player using command from xterm/
these files are all there when navigating using xterm/
In short how to launch the default player using command line.

thank you

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

I found something about the armv7-a at this page:
http://armin762.wordpress.com/2009/1...ges-available/

Maybe
“-Os -march=armv7-a -mcpu=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -pipe”
is something that could be used compiling mplayer

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Is there a way to make the default player use Mplayer?

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

is there a way to play flash streams in Mplayer?

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Try this, should be able to correct the AV sync;

bring up OSD, "-" for a big time, like 10,000 and see whether it helps, more info here, http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...871#post522871

bun

Re: Why is Mplayer not the default player for the N900?
 

Yes, KMPlayer turns to flash streams automagically.

bun