mplayer problems

[thane]

I had this posted at the end of xmms/oss newbie problem thread, but was OT. I posted:

I recently downloaded mplayer.tcz and have run into problems with video/sound sync and "too many packets in the buffer". These problems aren't unique to TCL; they seem to be widely reported for mplayer under various versions of Linux. Just wondering if anyone here has run across this and found solutions.

Jason W replied:

... seems to me like you have the same issues I have with some of my machines.  That is a processor that cannot keep up with the video, especially in unaccelerated Xvesa mode.  I don't see this with the same Mplayer and the same video/DVD on my faster machines.  YMMV.

[junan]

maybe u need to enable frame dropping. sometime it's help.

[mcewanw]

I think it is always important to give the main specs of the machine you are using (CPU and speed, installed RAM and so on), especially when the topic concerned process intensive video.

In terms of possible performance, using a lean Linux-based OS with mplayer, GeeXboX version 1.1 plays fullscreen DVD perfectly smoothly on my old Dell Latitude CPt, Celeron 400 MHz machine which only has 128 MBytes of RAM installed. I believe GeeXboX uses commandline mplayer in conjunction with framebuffer (rather than Xorg or Xvesa) however.

With Xorg you need to enable/choose mode xv for video acceleration on old machines (Xvesa doesn't provide video accel as far as I am aware).

Generally, I feel that is hard to match GeeXboX performance on a more general-purpose Linux (even a slim small one) however, since more processes are generally being run on such systems.  I have a frugal install of GeeXboX on my system (dual-booting with TC in a PPR/TCZ configuration as my main OS) for that very reason.

Should be no problem getting smooth fullscreen DVD video on a faster machine though (I find, for example, that a Pentium III 500MHz, 256 MB RAM, and above works fine with mplayer-nodeps).

[curaga]

I'm pretty familiar with Geexbox, having used the 1.x series myself for a while back. They have a uclibc-built small environment that loads to ram similar to TC. On the media player side the 1.x series uses normal Mplayer, but instead of framebuffer, they use direct Vesa bios access along with vidix graphics card acceleration.

Vidix is equivalent to XV in that it accelerates the showing part, ie scaling and filters, but it's a different architecture, for example there are no Intel drivers for vidix. Vidix should be usable on mplayer-nodeps and Xvesa, by running Mplayer as root and using -vo xvidix. I haven't tried it though.

[thane]

Thanks for the replies. I'm away from my TCL box now.

I'm running TCL on a Compaq Deskpro EN which has a Pentium III and 512M of RAM. It's using TCL's default video mode (Xvesa?). Mplayer is the gtk2 version -- I already had that set of libraries installed for another app so thought the additional overhead would be minimal.

Based on what's posted here it sounds like my box has plenty of horsepower for this. I'll try the mplayer nodeps version and see if that makes a difference.

[thane]

OK, stupid question:

How do I run the nodeps version of Mplayer?

[junan]

type mplayer at terminal. nodeps mean no gui support.

[thane]

Thanks junan (and everyone else who posted). It works! Running it with frames dropped; didn't look much at the other settings yet. The video skips occasionally but is synced with the sound.

[mcewanw]

I'm pretty familiar with Geexbox, having used the 1.x series myself for a while back. They have a uclibc-built small environment that loads to ram similar to TC. On the media player side the 1.x series uses normal Mplayer, but instead of framebuffer, they use direct Vesa bios access along with vidix graphics card acceleration.

Vidix is equivalent to XV in that it accelerates the showing part, ie scaling and filters, but it's a different architecture, for example there are no Intel drivers for vidix. Vidix should be usable on mplayer-nodeps and Xvesa, by running Mplayer as root and using -vo xvidix. I haven't tried it though.

Yep, vidix works well with mplayer on machine running bog standard Xvesa... (I've tried the following with both the nodeps version and the gtk2 version from the repos). Using alsa sound:

mplayer -fs -vo xvidix dvd://

On a Pentium III (Coppermine 450 MHz processor), with 256 MB RAM, and default tinycore Xvesa only, the above plays DVDs smoothly, at fullscreen, whilst keeping the CPU utilisation around 50%, which is just about as good as I've seen with Xorg with xv acceleration. The machine I've tried this on is an old, maybe nine or ten years old, Dell Latitude CPx laptop (with a neomagics video card AFAIK).

[curaga]

Heh, now I have tried xvidix, and it wouldn't recognize my card Even though it is claimed to be supported in the source (Radeon X1300, RV516). Nice to hear it works for others

[daemonjax]

I haven't tried playing DvDs, but I got mplayer to work flawlessly using the nodeps mplayer tce package along with the alsa tce package for sound.  This on a PII 266mhz laptop with 192megs of mem.

I prefer alsa to OSS, although there seems to be something wrong with the script to save my mixer settings between reboots.

[thane]

In TCL 2.x I'm using mplayer nodeps + ALSA for audio/video and streaming radio. I have to set the mplayer playback speed to .86 to get the sound right though. ALSA in TCL 1.x played back at normal speed in both mplayer and XMMS. I've seen reports on other Linux forums about playback speed problems with the soundcard in my PC (Compaq Deskpro EN) so I don't think it's a TCL-specific thing.

[daemonjax]

In TCL 2.x I'm using mplayer nodeps + ALSA for audio/video and streaming radio. I have to set the mplayer playback speed to .86 to get the sound right though. ALSA in TCL 1.x played back at normal speed in both mplayer and XMMS. I've seen reports on other Linux forums about playback speed problems with the soundcard in my PC (Compaq Deskpro EN) so I don't think it's a TCL-specific thing.

Well, I guess the important thing is that you've found a work-around... which is the next best thing to it working out of the box -- something I always hope for, but don't expect.

[thane]

Still don't know why ALSA (but not OSS ever) worked OK on my box in TCL 1.x but not 2.x. Other forums have had various explanations like a change in the Linux kernel or sound driver, but that doesn't seem applicable in TCL.

[thane]

Yesterday I had to go back to TCL 1 so I could play some on-line music clips. Although I can work around the sound problem in mplayer, if I play anything in Flash or XMMS the problem is still there.