Most efficient HEVC player for Linux?

[bizzybody]

I've searched on this but most things I've found are a year or more old. What's the latest and greatest for playing HEVC on Linux? I just installed Ubuntu 16.04.1 x64. It plays HEVC video but it could do better.

I don't know what program it's using, default applications just says Videos for video, and there are no other choices for video.

[sneaker]

Try mpv x64.

It plays HEVC video but it could do better.

"Better" in what way? Some options you are missing? Is it too slow for real-time decoding? Any HEVC hardware decoder you could use on your system? System specs?

[bizzybody]

It's a laptop with a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU. Intel 965 chipset. Not expecting it to handle 1080p but it should be able to play 720p HEVC better than it does.

[Marsia Mariner]

It's a laptop with a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU. Intel 965 chipset.

Then perhaps MPlayer x64 would be a better choice than mpv, which I consider "too heavy" for ancient machines. Just make sure MPlayer is configured for using more than one thread. Still, it's possible that your laptop actually is too slow for playing 720p H.265 video smoothly

[sneaker]

I thought mpv was more optimized but I just ran a test and it turns out I misremembered that. Not good without hardware decoding which your system doesn't have. The Linux HEVC players kinda suck in terms of software decoding speed. On Windows we have Lentoid and LAV x64. Much faster...

[sophisticles]

It's a laptop with a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU. Intel 965 chipset. Not expecting it to handle 1080p but it should be able to play 720p HEVC better than it does.

I think you're asking way too much of a laptop with a mobile Core 2. I have an old laptop with an X2 Turion that's higher clocked than your Core 2 and it can't play back HD HEVC smoothly, not with Windows and not with Linux, not even a very stripped down Debian install.

I run Linux full time on my main desktop, currently using Ubuntu 16.10, I personally recommend smplayer but in all honesty it's unfair to ask any computer so old to be able to handle these new codecs, like HEVC and VP9, not to mention next year when we start seeing AV1 and VP10 even current generation hardware will be struggling.

[bizzybody]

I wasn't surprised the laptop would be lousy at 1080p, doesn't really matter since its LCD is only 1280x800. If only there was a port of Potplayer to Linux.

A friend is running XP on a dual core Socket AM2 with a 8800GT with Strongene OpenCL and LAV. It runs 720P HEVC perfectly. Can almost but not quite do 1080p. Its fine with h.264 1080p.

Before that he had the same video card and software with a dual core Socket 939. It had a single core CPU to start with. I put in the videocard. No help for it. Then I found the Strongene and LAV software. After installing that and using the LAV video settings to enable Nvidia CUVID and check the HEVC box it could play 720p HEVC with only a little stutter in fine detail of fast motion scenes. Swapping in the dual core made it perfect. Ran that until the mobo died of leaky caps so I gave him the AM2 system. I should see if that board can run an AM3 Phenom II. I have an AM2+ desktop with a 9800GT and AM3 Phenom II 555 CPU. No problem with it playing 1080p HEVC. (Encoding it is a different story. Takes me back to the lack of speed an old P3 had encoding to MPEG2 for making DVDs. 7FPS with a stiff tailwind...)

[sneaker]

I could play 1080p24 low bitrate (~2 Mbps) on an old Intel Pentium T3400 (2008 2.16 GHz dual core, laptop) using Lentoid/Strongene (non-opencl software) decoder. But like I said: LAV x64 and Lentoid are faster HEVC decoders than anything I know available on Linux. Lentoid seems especially suited for some of these old CPUs (less reliance on SSE4/AVX than LAV?).

After installing that and using the LAV video settings to enable Nvidia CUVID and check the HEVC box it could play 720p HEVC with only a little stutter in fine detail of fast motion scenes.

LAV won't use CUVID for HEVC on old GPUs like 8800GT and 9800GT. It falls back to pure software decoding.

[bizzybody]

I could play 1080p24 low bitrate (~2 Mbps) on an old Intel Pentium T3400 (2008 2.16 GHz dual core, laptop) using Lentoid/Strongene (non-opencl software) decoder. But like I said: LAV x64 and Lentoid are faster HEVC decoders than anything I know available on Linux. Lentoid seems especially suited for some of these old CPUs (less reliance on SSE4/AVX than LAV?).

After installing that and using the LAV video settings to enable Nvidia CUVID and check the HEVC box it could play 720p HEVC with only a little stutter in fine detail of fast motion scenes.

LAV won't use CUVID for HEVC on old GPUs like 8800GT and 9800GT. It falls back to pure software decoding.

It must be doing something with it. If I select a different option the old thing *cannot* play high detail/fast motion 720p without stuttering. Without the Strongene OpenCL installed the CUVID option isn't available in LAV. If the combination of the two was really not doing anything for it, then they would not improve the video playing.

[bizzybody]

Well, MPlayer doesn't work.
Error in skin config file at line 6: PNG read error in /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default/main

I used Terminal to install
sudo apt-get install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins

No errors there.

I went to the Ubuntu Software thing on the launcher and found MPlayer there, the button said Install instead of Installed. So I clicked that and it changes to Installed and an Icon appears in the launcher bar. Still has the same error.

[Marsia Mariner]

Well, MPlayer doesn't work.
Error in skin config file at line 6: PNG read error in /usr/share/mplayer/skins/default/main

I used Terminal to install
sudo apt-get install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins

No errors there.

I went to the Ubuntu Software thing on the launcher and found MPlayer there, the button said Install instead of Installed. So I clicked that and it changes to Installed and an Icon appears in the launcher bar. Still has the same error.

Apologies for not being clear enough.
MPlayer is a command-line application.
When I said MPlayer, I meant MPlayer, not "MPlayer plus a GUI plus some skins".
GUIs are resource hogs, and the older the machine, the sooner you can perceive that.
I had a jurassic Pentium-4 running @ 1.5GHz, and only the first versions of MPUI were not too heavy for it.
SMPlayer always was *too much* for the puny monocore.

The only Linux distro that I used with some regularity is Puppy Linux.
I know nothing of Ubuntu, so I cannot help you with that.

[bizzybody]

I removed MPlayer and installed Gnome MPlayer. That one works quite well with 720p HEVC.
Just for fun I tried it with a 1080p HEVC video. Doesn't skip a single frame, but can't manage to play them at *full speed* so the video is lagging behind the sound.

I may buy a new battery for this and a 2gig SODIMM to replace one of the 1gigs in it. One of the Macintosh vendors has carefully selected pairs of 2gig modules for MacBooks that are essentially this same hardware, same chipset, same display resolution. I wonder if they'd work in this Acer and give it 3.25 or 3.5 gig accessible RAM? Every forum post I've seen by anyone who has tried 4 gig in this laptop has been to report either no boot, boots but does a BSOD shortly after or boot loops. 'Course those were all with Windows.

The major reason I put Linux on this laptop was so I can do things with an Orange Pi Plus 2E. That little board has a quad core SOC with integrated GPU, 2 gig RAM and a 16gig eMMC plus HDMI, three USB2, one USB OTC, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and an IR input with a footprint barely larger than a credit card. Came with Android 4.4 installed. It has no trouble at all playing 1080p HEVC. Getting things setup to install a different OS pretty much requires having a PC running Linux.

I'm going to try Lubuntu on it then see if I can get Linux CNC running on it with a stepper motor interface board to run a CNC metal lathe.

[sneaker]

It must be doing something with it. If I select a different option the old thing *cannot* play high detail/fast motion 720p without stuttering. Without the Strongene OpenCL installed the CUVID option isn't available in LAV. If the combination of the two was really not doing anything for it, then they would not improve the video playing.

Maybe during your tests memory usage was different or GPU / CPU were in a different power state or whatever. LAV does NOT use CUVID for HEVC on these old cards. Period.