How-to fix Linux X264 playback speed

[duyfken]

I installed Linux Mint 3.0 on my laptop (Centrino 1.5Ghz, I think it's a dothan core, with 512MB RAM) and found it to be excellent with codec support. However, I have issues trying to play my 720p Matroska videos at full speed. They played pretty smoothly on Windows using MPC, Haali and CoreAVC, I want to acheive this with Linux (so I can finally ditch M$ Window$) but don't know how to speed up the playback.

I currently use MPlayer, set to use ALSA for audio and XV for video with direct rendering but the video lags behind the audio.

If anybody knows how to speed up playback so its smooth, please post a response ASAP.
Many thanx in advance.

[GMaq]

Hi,
The CoreAVC codec you used with Windows is known to be able to playback H.264 with lower CPU requirements than other Codecs, It is most likely that the MPlayer H.264 decoder is more power hungry especially at 720P. Does the problem happen if you play smaller resolution H.264 i.e. 640xXXX? Try VLC it may have a more efficient decoder and it works well in Linux. I just re-did my HTPC with Linux Mint 3.0, it really rocks!!

[celtic_druid]

VLC and mplayer both use libavcodec for AVC decoding and mplayer is generally more efficient than VLC. If you installed mplayer, etc. from official repositories then they are probably compiled with generic flags. You should be able to get a speed boost by compiling them yourself, however as said CoreAVC is simply more efficient than libavcodec. There was as I recall a patch to get mplayer's win dll loader module working with CoreAVC. That's if you are running 32bit linux (don't think the win32 loader works under x86_64).

[duyfken]

I do use 32bit (Linux Mint is currently only available in 32bit ).

I recall a patch to get mplayer's win dll loader module working with CoreAVC

I have heard about this patch, I just don't how to use it and get CoreAVC working with MPlayer. If somebody knows how, could you please leave a step by step guide here.

Thanx many in advance to whoever helps and thanx to celtic_druid and GMaq for answering so far.

[celtic_druid]

1. Download source
2. Patch source
3. Compile
4. Install
5. copy coreavc and registration info to appropriate place.

I can tell you how to get the source, how to apply patches, how to compile stuff (./configure && make) how to install (make install), but that is about it. No idea about a working coreavc patch, whether it still applies cleanly to svn code, etc.

[duyfken]

How would i go about compiling it and making sure it still uses the codecs already installed with Linux Mint in addition to CoreAVC? or will it use the codecs already installed unless specified otherwise (ie CoreAVC patch)?

[celtic_druid]

One would assume that you would specify coreavc followed by a , in your conf file. That way it would use coreavc, but fall back on the default decoder if it doesn't work. At least something like that. I guess editing codecs.conf to enable coreavc for avc decoding ahead of libavcodec would also work. From recollection at least one of the patches used codecs.conf to store the registry info. From recollection it also involved hard code a bunch of stuff and never worked that well.

[duyfken]

From recollection at least one of the patches used codecs.conf to store the registry info.

Well the only one I could find is this one at the CCCP project: http://www.cccp-project.net/nichorai/mplayer-patches/mplayer-coreavc-full-take3.patch, so if you could post any links to alternative approachs to implementing a CoreAVC patch into MPlayer, it would be greatly appreciated .

[duyfken]

OK. I have changed to Xubuntu (for overall speed enhancements, as its a slimmer system) and have tryed to make mplayer from source applying the CCCP patch (http://www.cccp-project.net/nichorai/mplayer-patches/mplayer-coreavc-full-take3.patch), however for one reason or another it will not compile.

So, I ask, does anybody know of any way to increase rendering performance (even if slightly) of MPlayer?

[acid_burn]

you will lose a little quality on large color blocks but if frame rate is your main concern then this should speed you up quite a bit.
-lavcopts skiploopfilter=all

[petesimon]

I installed Linux Mint 3.0 on my laptop (Centrino 1.5Ghz, I think it's a dothan core, with 512MB RAM) and found it to be excellent with codec support. However, I have issues trying to play my 720p Matroska videos at full speed. They played pretty smoothly on Windows using MPC, Haali and CoreAVC, I want to acheive this with Linux (so I can finally ditch M$ Window$) but don't know how to speed up the playback.

I currently use MPlayer, set to use ALSA for audio and XV for video with direct rendering but the video lags behind the audio.

If anybody knows how to speed up playback so its smooth, please post a response ASAP.
Many thanx in advance.

First off, do u use the command-line or GUI such as MPlayer/GMplayer/KMPlayer? and what version? Try this in your terminal to find the version of the command-line edition:

clear; mplayer | head -5

and look at the line that starts with "MPlayer". If it is something like 1.0rc, then it's outdated.
Since Mint Linux is similar to Ubuntu, you might be able to install a quite newer version of MPlayer from Launchpad.net's PPA downloads, as I did in my Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10. More a/v codecs are available (E-AC3, DTS, etc.) as well. Also look at your mplayer.conf file usually in /etc/mplayer/ directory and look at your ~/.mplayer/config file to see their configurations. You might disable any lines with video post-processing "vf" which maybe unecessary with high-res videos. If you got ATI or NVIDIA video card, then be sure to install its respective binary video driver and enable it, and then try to run mplayer in the terminal with GL video output & fullscreen playback to test playback performance, but again without any post-processing "-vf" options. I usually use -vf for low-res/low-quality .avi files.

mplayer -vo gl -ao alsa -fs movie.mkv

but I found "mplayer -vo gl -ao pulse -fs movie.mkv" to be smoother for both video & audio.
I find SMPlayer GUI is often easier to use and troubleshoot, however it does not guarantee the version of mplayer command is new.
NVIDIA is trying to help video-playback acceleration with their VDPAU feature.
http://http.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/vdpau/doxygen/html/index.html
I found this just the other day, so I don't know how to use/enable it. I'll try to setup that VDPAU and dl some big HD apple movie trailers to test quicktime compatibility and playback speed/smoothness.
Cheers mate.