Notices

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

@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

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!

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).

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

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

Ah, cool. I stand corrected.

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


Si

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.

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.