Thoughts about OS 2008 - Page 6 - maemo.org

lardman | # 51 | 2007-11-19, 10:10 | Report

Originally Posted by

The N800/OS2008 has yet to play any of my personal videos. Luckily, I didn't buy it for that, but I'm surprised as heck that it does such a poor job.

What's the issue with these videos? Unsupported formats or poor images/sound?

TCPMP was an add-on, perhaps you should try mplayer (and wait until Serge gets his N810 so he can optimise for that hardware, etc.)

Jupex | # 52 | 2007-11-19, 10:45 | Report

I have used the new sleek os for allmost a week now. First of all I am somewhat impressed about 2008. Secondly ... it's not ready for prime time yet. Too many software missing, skype being the most important one. Install it now? Nah ... I'd wait for a month or 2 or untill skype etc. are ready to install. I am thinking of going back to os 2007.

Second gripe is about the video issues. I know it supports many formats. Currently I can watch video ment for iPod without any hickups. It just looks plain bad. The video itself is ment to be seen from iPod screen. Wich is far smaller than N800 video, so it's pixelorated. And nobody seems to know wich settings to use, to get the video right.

TA-t3 | # 53 | 2007-11-19, 12:42 | Report

TCPMP is a pretty amazing application. It plays anything, no worries about reformatting even. And on (at this stage) old Palm hardware, at that..

lardman | # 54 | 2007-11-19, 13:02 | Report

Originally Posted by

TCPMP is a pretty amazing application. It plays anything, no worries about reformatting even. And on (at this stage) old Palm hardware, at that..

Oh yes, I'm not knocking its abilities, it's just that it doesn't come installed as standard, nor does mplayer, and mplayer is better than the built-in video player afaik.

It would be interesting to know how TCPMP is so fast on your old Palm hardware (cpu speed? HW video accel?). There is source for TCPMP before it became Core Player (what ever happened to the promised open source Betaplayer?), might be worth a look to see if there are any improvements/optimisations for mplayer.

fanoush | # 55 | 2007-11-19, 13:36 | Report

Originally Posted by lardman View Post

It would be interesting to know how TCPMP is so fast on your old Palm hardware (cpu speed? HW video accel?). There is source for TCPMP before it became Core Player (what ever happened to the promised open source Betaplayer?), might be worth a look to see if there are any improvements/optimisations for mplayer.

AFAIK there is no video acceleration for PXA or OMAP based palms in TCPMP. There is one for Zodiac. The speed is partly due to optimizations (there is optional ffmpeg plugin which is called 'slow and bloated') and mainly because screen for palms has much lower resolution (320x320 or 320x480) so there is less pixel data to draw. Also palmos is simple so there is low/zero system overhead (flat memory, code runs in kernel mode, direct access to framebuffer, almost no context switches). I guess mplayer can now do better on 770 with same resolution than on palms. TCPMP source is here

rhouge | # 56 | 2007-11-19, 18:26 | Report

Anyone tested the WMV format on the native player? I am really hoping that with this video format supported I will be able to use Canola and Orb (are these working on OS08 yet?) to view my shared (windows) media center videos and recorded TV without having to process them through media converter. Possibly even the "Live TV" that is available with Orb.

Thoughts on this approach?

kyyla | # 57 | 2007-11-19, 18:33 | Report

One random wmv worked.

zerojay | # 58 | 2007-11-19, 18:36 | Report

Originally Posted by rhouge View Post

Anyone tested the WMV format on the native player? I am really hoping that with this video format supported I will be able to use Canola and Orb (are these working on OS08 yet?) to view my shared (windows) media center videos and recorded TV without having to process them through media converter. Possibly even the "Live TV" that is available with Orb.

Thoughts on this approach?

It's going to depend on your resolution.

JeffElkins | # 59 | 2007-11-19, 18:55 | Report

Originally Posted by TA-t3 View Post

TCPMP is a pretty amazing application. It plays anything, no worries about reformatting even. And on (at this stage) old Palm hardware, at that..

Exactly. My videos (1.5 terabytes so far) are a mixture of xVid/DivX and H.264. I watch them on everything from a media server on a 60" LCD HDTV down to the Treo 700P. I'm a video snob, and they are very high quality.

I have tried mplayer (use it all the time on the desktop), in fact I just compiled it according to Serg's instructions yesterday and the N800 choked on a bog-normal avi cartoon I downloaded somewhere:

Code:

           ************************************************
           **** Your system is too SLOW to play this!  ****
           ************************************************

Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
  - Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
  - Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
  - Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
  - Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts,
    e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
  - Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
  - Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
  - Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not tossing my N800, I didn't buy it for video, but the claims made for video and the 400mhz clock were a bit overstated to say the least.

And no, I'm not at all interested in re-encoding video especially for the N800.

lardman | # 60 | 2007-11-19, 20:18 | Report

Have you tried things like -framedrop as it suggests?