Video Playback

Anyone got a tips for smooth video playback? I've got some DVD and Blu-ray rips that mostly work good, but I'm getting some tearing and occasionally some stutter. So far I've just disabled compiz to try to fix it, but that didn't help. I noticed the same behavior in VLC and mplayer. Thanks for any help.

 

If you have ATI, look in the CCC in preferences for "Enable Tear Free Desktop".

It worked for me.

 

I didn't know about the Tear Free Desktop so I just forced Vsync, no more tearing.

 

I tried the no tear, but it worked a little too good. Now I got no video at all.

 

How do you manually force Vsync?

Sorry. Which driver were you on? The one supplied by Ubuntu? Or the proprietary one (downloaded from ATI)?

 

There's no need to be sorry. It was worth a shot. I'm using proprietary drivers from AMD. I had a nVidia card in there, but that wasn't working too good either. I thought I'd try my AMD card to see if it was any better, but they seem about the same.

 

In VLC there is an option to choose which video backend should be used for video decoding and rendering. There would usually be a long list around 10+ (in my case at least), I usually try with various backends and see which works the best.

I usually experienced tearing on my laptop(which has an old Core 2 Duo) while decoing 720p or 1080i but I was able to get rid of it by using the hardware accelerated option (xgl or something like that).

There might be similar settings in other players as well.

Enabling Vysnc is also a good idea to have a smooth picture - but I usually havent observed any difference in enabling/disabling vsync on the 2 PCs and one laptop I commonly use.

 

Use synaptic and download ffmpeg-mt, it is the multi-threaded version of the ffmpeg codec that handles video encoded in x264. It should double your performance.

 

Thanks naticus, that did seem to help some, but I'm still not where I need to be. Would I better off going back to nVidia? Everyone keeps telling me it's better, but they seem to be about the same to me.

I'm not familiar with the back end. How would I go about finding it? Thanks.

 

right, so you have the codecs now you need the player. You need mplayer and it's frontend smplayer. You have mint, so I assume mint11 or mint lmde, type this:

sudo apt-get install mplayer

sudo apt-get install smplayer.

When you run smplayer go to:

Options>General>Video>Video output (make sure it is 'user defined' and the field be 'xv,' without the qoutations.

now go to :

'Performance' tab on the left of the same options (that you were in previously)

now click on the 'up' arrow for "threads for decoding" and make it '2'.

loop filter should be 'enabled'.


* this is all after you have ffmpeg-mt, and mplayer with the smplayer frontend installed.

good luck mate.

 

Thanks naticus. I ran through all the steps, but when I went to play video in smplayer, it popped up some dialog box saying something about it wasn't sure it had the right version of something. I can't remember exactly as I closed it and it doesn't do it again, but smplayer doesn't play any videos.

 

I believe the box in SMPlayer that you're talking about is asking you which version of MPlayer you have installed... I saw that too. I had to google it. Anyways, I had to select the 3rd option of the 3 given. It was the newest version or better option.

 

I've had better success usually with VLC than mplayer with any plugin/codec issues. Just give that a shot to see if you notice any improvement, if not go back to mplayer.

mplayer is a well written and advanced player which can play even when the file is corrupted (to some extent) and also improperly composed.

 

How do I get the box back? I closed it right away and hasn't come up again. SMPlayers seems better, but has issues of its own. Right now neither is really good enough. I don't know how to access the back end on VLC, so there's not much for me to mess around with. If I throw Windows on the machine and Media Player Classic on the machine I have no issues.

Edit: Just for fun I tossed my nVidia card back in and it said my driver was activated, but not in use. I could use the software, but I wonder if this is effecting my performance. I gather from elsewhere, this is a bug, but I don't know how to fix it.

 

Always use the proprietary drivers for your ATI and nvidia cards - believe me the reality is that the open source driver's performance is no where close to the prop drivers.

in VLC, open Tools->preferences:

Video->Output for accessing the video backend
Audio->Output module for accessing the audio backend

The settings are far simpler than MPC

 

Yeah, but if I can't get the card working, it's probably not going to work well. Thanks Tux.

 

You must not have gotten the ffmpeg-mt installled properly. I would recommend uninstalling the libs for ffmpeg and compiling an git from source, it should fix all of your issues.

This should help.

HOWTO: Compiling mplayer with multi-core decoding support - Ubuntu Forums

 

Out of curiosity, could you post your hardware specs ? CPU, RAM, chipset, Graphics card and type of Hard drive will do...

 

Motherboard: Foxconn A74ML-K
CPU: AMD Athlon II x4 600e
Chipset: 740G + SB700
Memory: 2GB PC6400
GPU: I have a GT520 and a 5450
Drives 40GB Agility 2 SSD(Boot Drive), 2x2TB 5400RPM(Hitachi 5k3000)

I finished my Windows install yesterday and made my image. Hopefully, I can get this work as I'd prefer to run Linux, but Windows at least works good.

 

I just tried again with Mint and the GT520. It keeps telling me my GPU driver is in use, but not active. I think if I can get this solved, I'll be on the road to fixing things.

 

Is this when you try to install the driver ?

nvidia drivers should be installed when the driver is not already loaded - so you should do an 'init 3' as sudo/root first to switch to runlevel 3, and do an rmmod nvidia again as sudo/root to remove any loaded instances of the nvidia module. Then try to install your nvidia driver setup script as root/sudo.

 

You'll have to forgive my lack of knowledge on the subject, but I'm not super familiar with init 3 or runlevel 3. I've gathered from my searching around the internet that I'm not the only one having this problem. I wonder if there's a distro or version that would work better?

 

If you type nvidia-settings in a terminal, what do you get?

 

I dont know of any distro which bundle proprietary drivers with their distro directly (I might be wrong here), but Ubuntu does provide an one-click install for the proprietary drivers. Although these drivers provided by Ubuntu might not be the latest, it is still fairly easy enough to install them and should do the trick.

 

Did you ever get your problem sorted ZaZ?

 

Thanks Hal. No, I'm afraid not. I had to send my GT520 back to NewEgg cause otherwise I would have had to pay for it. Why pay for something that isn't working? Interestingly, I put my 5450 back into the machine. I installed the driver and it says it's activated. The video playback however remains about the same with some tearing and stutter. That's for both DVD and BD rips. I had actually had just gotten back to it right now. So far I've installed ffmpeg, but that doesn't seem to have done much either. If anyone has any good ideas, I'm all ears.

 

Try this:
uninstall mplayer ( sudo apt-get purge mplayer)

then

- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ripps818/coreavc

- sudo apt-get update

- sudo apt-get install mplayer

- sudo apt-get install smplayer


After you install smplayer configure it. Options> Preferences>General>video -- make sure it is xv

Then Options>Preferences>Performance>Threads.... -- make this how many cores you have (2 or 4). Then below that: Loop Filter -- skip only on HD Videos.


See if this improves performance. That PPA is basically a compiled mplayer2 build with MT support. It should give you a performance boost in x264 playback.

Let me know.

 

Is there some other display/monitor that you could try this with ? Preferably if you have a HDMI/DVI port use that to connect your display. Check if it makes any difference.

 

I do have a monitor I can hook it to, but when I run Windows on it, it works perfectly.

 

I did all that. It seems a bit better, but not where it needs to be.

On AVS forum where I was seeking some help for this, someone suggested mplayer was not using VDPAU. I have no idea what it is, but it sounded good. I added:

vo=vdpau,xv,
vc=ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,

to the config file as was suggested. It helped a little too, but it's still not where it needs to be. I'm still entertaining suggestions before I flip back to Windows if any are available.

As I said before it works perfectly in Windows, which makes me think it's missing some codec or someting, but I don't know what it would be or how to find it.

 

You are probably in the sam boat I am in, the drivers are just not yet comparable to their Win7 conterpart -- my problem is Fusion AMD and Linux. I have worked on my ATI config and have found that it works a lot better than before. Also I am using Kernel Linux 3.0, which seems to help a lot for ATI cards, etc.,

 

It looks like I'm back to Windows then, which is a bummer.

I had a box a few years back running 8 or 9, I can't remember. I never had any trouble with it, BDs or DVDs. I never even installed the drivers. That's why I'm surprised this has turned out to be such a pain. I wonder if a different distro would offer me something better? Thanks for the help nonetheless.

 

It's possible that that machine had a chipset in it that was old enough it had gotten support slipped into the mainline kernel etc by the time you got it. Give it time, the AMD Fusion based machines will catch up.

 

Thanks Sxooter. I'm curious, is my Foxconn A74ML-K board considered that new?

 

That's got a Radeon 2100 which is quite old actually.

 

I'd be using the 5450, which is pretty new I think. The chipset is the 740g, but I don't know if that's old or new.

 

AFAIK Linux mainline kernel do not remove support for mainstream chipsets released within the past 10 yrs at least. But support for proper drivers especially the ones which are not part of the Linux kernel source/modules itself is a totally different thing.

I dont know which distro would help you but it is really worth trying out another distro just to see if the problem gets fixed there.

I myself notice occasional screen tearing when watching few of the videos but I watch it on my 46" TV connected to my linux rig, so I dont notice the screen tear unless I'm really looking for it (rather than watching a movie). Is this something similar to this or something which really affects your viewing completely ?

 

Thanks Tux. The machine works great in all other respects. Sometimes I'll go 10-15 minutes without seeing anything and others I'll see quite a bit of it. Some videos stutter too. Since watching movies on it is it's primary purpose, it's a deal breaker for me, especially since it works perfectly in Windows. It's too bad as I really wanted to use it. I really liked the preview pictures I could use in Linux that I can't find a way to do in Windows.

 

I do not unfortunately wish to give up that easily especially on Linux - I've given up many times in the past but have somehow landed upon a solution when I was not looking for it

Okay I was going thru VLC's settings and I noticed these settings under Tools->Preferences->Input&Codecs:
Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter - Try setting it to "All"
Use GPU acceleration(experimental) - enable this

I'm sure these settings have been there for quite some time in VLC preferences, so it should be pretty much there even if you're using an older version of VLC. Give it a shot and let me know if it works.

One more thing you can try to do (although I doubt this would work) is try starting these players from command line and probably redirecting the output to a log file like:

Code:

vlc abcd.avi 2>&1 | tee myfile.log

You should be able to see the logs on screen as well as redirected into the log file - also you'd get both stdout and stderr in a single file (as well as on the screen)

So in these logs - try to see if you notice any erroneous messages especially when you see these screen tears happening. I doubt the player would be able to catch an error which happens for screen tearing in the first place but it also gives you the chance to notice if there are any suspicious error messages which you can try to fix.

 

I got Windows back on my machine. I don't think I'm really ready to install Linux once again to test another theory. Perhaps I'll try it on my R60e. If it goes well, then we'll see. Thanks again.

 

Hmm... I'm going to try some of the stuff you guys listed as well. I seem to have cured tearing with 720p videos. If I go full screen it's like vsync is enabled... no tearing. But playing back 1080p videos still tears, full screen or not.

It's funny though, because my old Acer with an i945/GMA950 is buttery smooth on anything but 1080p.

I'm running an HD 4850 BTW.

 

Yes even my 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo laptop with an nvidia 8600M GT 256MB faces the same problem - 720p videos work fine but not 1080p - I felt it was because the CPU was not powerful enough to do the decoding. I dont know how comparable the 8600M GT's hardware decoder is compared to todays nvidia cards - so I just had to avoid 1080p videos altogether on the laptop.

Also MPEG2 encoded 1080p videos and H.264 encoded 1080p videos make a lot of difference especially when the CPU is doing the decoding. See if you experience screen tear with MPEG2 encoded videos - for example Blurays, HDDVDs native format usually is MPEG2 and greater than 4 or 8GB in size, but the H.264 encoded ones are the ones usually like 1 - 2 GB for the same 1080p movie.

 

My R60 had a Core 2 Duo and it played 1080p videos just fine in Windows. I think it was hitting the CPU at 30-40% as I recall, though to some degree it will depend on the video. Blu-rays played at 95-100% depending on the disc.

 

VDPAU API was introduced for nvidia cards since the Geforce 8 series, but support for MPEG-4 and H.264 codecs came pretty late only with the Geforce 200 series I think.

VDPAU is more or less equivalent to DXVA in Windows.

ZaZ - which specific GPU was that on your R60 ?

 

X1400, which I believe does not support decoding.