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Thread: Playing a 1080 mkv

  1. #1
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    Playing a 1080 mkv

    Hi there,

    I have lots of 720p MKV files which play fine on VLC and/or mplayer. These are the two players I know.

    Whenever I try to play a 1080p file, the video is sluggish and quickly desynchronizes from the audio (mplayer) or the sound is choppy (vlc).

    This is because one CPU cannot decode a 1080p x264 video. Not powerful enough.

    Now, I have a Q6600, with 4 cores. Options in mplayer and VLC to use more than one decoding thread don't seem to do anything at this date, as one core is only user (reported by TOP).

    Any idea how I can work this problem out?

  2. #2
    TenPlus1's Avatar
    TenPlus1 is offline Grande Half-n-Half Cinnamon Ubuntu
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    Smile Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    In VLC Preferences, go to Input & Codecs and change the "Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter" to "ALL", this helps when playing hi-res mkv's and h.264 videos for me... You could also see if ticking the "Use GPU acceperation" works after installing libvdpau1.

  3. #3
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    Support for multi-threading is in recent SVN versions of mplayer. You can follow this article to add a repository with these versions. These are builds by the mplayer staff itself, so they should be trustworthy.

    You will need to add "-lavdopts threads=4" to the mplayer command to use all four cores.

    I'm not using the version in the repositories because I build the mplayer2 fork from source. (It has some features like support for ordered chapters in Matroska that aren't in the main trunk.) However that's basically a patched version of the SVN code, and I can confirm it uses all four cores when using the xv video driver to display 1080p material.

    libvdpau only works with recent NVIDIA cards (8xxx and later). If you have an NVIDIA adapter, install the proprietary drivers if you haven't already, then use "-vo vdpau" or select it from the driver list in smplayer. This method offloads the H.264 decoding process to the graphics hardware. If you can use this approach, you won't need to worry about multi-threading.
    Last edited by SeijiSensei; April 21st, 2011 at 02:06 PM.

  4. #4
    beew is offline I Ubuntu, Therefore, I Am
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    You can get a multi-threaded version of mplayer (build from svn and statically linked to its own ffmpeg library) from this ppa.https://launchpad.net/~ripps818/+archive/coreavc (I don't use coreavc, I just install mplayer)

    It plays 1080p mkv smoothly even with the open source driver on my Nvidia laptop. I tried the MOTU daily build on Natty but it is not as good, fast motion scenes kind of sluggish but ripps' version plays anything smoothly on all machines I have tested.

    For multithreaded VLC, see andrew.46's post (and he is the man to go to for VLC question)
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1734268&page=2

    Quote Originally Posted by TenPlus1 View Post
    In VLC Preferences, go to Input & Codecs and change the "Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter" to "ALL", this helps when playing hi-res mkv's and h.264 videos for me... You could also see if ticking the "Use GPU acceperation" works after installing libvdpau1.
    That would play the video but the quality may be poor, which defeats the purpose of 1080p though.
    Last edited by beew; April 21st, 2011 at 05:35 PM.

  5. #5
    beew is offline I Ubuntu, Therefore, I Am
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    I forgot to mention, I find the portable version of VLC works very well on my system
    http://portablelinuxapps.org/(try VLC 1.20-git)

  6. #6
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    Quote Originally Posted by pieroxy View Post
    Hi there,

    I have lots of 720p MKV files which play fine on VLC and/or mplayer. These are the two players I know.

    Whenever I try to play a 1080p file, the video is sluggish and quickly desynchronizes from the audio (mplayer) or the sound is choppy (vlc).

    This is because one CPU cannot decode a 1080p x264 video. Not powerful enough.

    Now, I have a Q6600, with 4 cores. Options in mplayer and VLC to use more than one decoding thread don't seem to do anything at this date, as one core is only user (reported by TOP).

    Any idea how I can work this problem out?

    Pieroxy i found whatever settings i changed on vlc and mplayer 1080 was always a problem especially on vlc sadly as it is still my favourite player

    smplayer ( which is a frontend for mplayer) which is in synaptic on the other hand plays 1080p with no problems whatsoever on my machine so maybe give that one a whirl see how it goes...

    options/preferences/video/vdpau needs to be ticked



    also xmbc has no problem whatsoever with 1080p


    but i must say 10plus1 this
    In VLC Preferences, go to Input & Codecs and change the "Skip H.264 in-loop deblocking filter" to "ALL", this helps when playing hi-res mkv's and h.264 videos for me... You could also see if ticking the "Use GPU acceperation" works after installing libvdpau1.
    really works for me thanx

    nice one to test it with
    Last edited by shantiq; April 21st, 2011 at 10:39 PM.
    Linux is Latin for off-the-beaten-track
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  7. #7
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    Quote Originally Posted by shantiq View Post
    smplayer ( which is a frontend for mplayer) which is in synaptic on the other hand plays 1080p with no problems whatsoever on my machine so maybe give that one a whirl see how it goes...
    What matters is the mplayer version in use and whether you can use VDPAU for H.264 decoding. SMplayer is just a shell.

    If the OP doesn't have a recent NVIDIA card, then he'll need to rely on the machine's CPU for decoding. Using a multi-threaded version of mplayer can make a big difference in that case.

  8. #8
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    Quote Originally Posted by beew View Post
    You can get a multi-threaded version of mplayer (build from svn and statically linked to its own ffmpeg library) from this ppa.https://launchpad.net/~ripps818/+archive/coreavc (I don't use coreavc, I just install mplayer)
    I downloaded mplayer-build-1.0~rc4+git20110329.683953a and built mplayer. Still one thread used. I built ffmpeg-mt and I can play a movie quite smoothly (more than 100% CPU being used) with ffplay. But ffplay is... crude.

    In the top directory, I'm supposed to do a ./init --shallow but it fails with:

    fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git


    Any idea on how to build it?

  9. #9
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    Quote Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
    Support for multi-threading is in recent SVN versions of mplayer. You can follow this article to add a repository with these versions. These are builds by the mplayer staff itself, so they should be trustworthy.

    You will need to add "-lavdopts threads=4" to the mplayer command to use all four cores.

    I'm not using the version in the repositories because I build the mplayer2 fork from source. (It has some features like support for ordered chapters in Matroska that aren't in the main trunk.) However that's basically a patched version of the SVN code, and I can confirm it uses all four cores when using the xv video driver to display 1080p material.

    libvdpau only works with recent NVIDIA cards (8xxx and later). If you have an NVIDIA adapter, install the proprietary drivers if you haven't already, then use "-vo vdpau" or select it from the driver list in smplayer. This method offloads the H.264 decoding process to the graphics hardware. If you can use this approach, you won't need to worry about multi-threading.
    I tried the nightly and I can't compile it... it fails at some point with an error.

  10. #10
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    Re: Playing a 1080 mkv

    Did you try installing from the PPA repository as described in the link I gave you? You shouldn't need to compile anything if you use those.

    If you want to give compiling a shot, I'd suggest using the source from the mplayer2 site, then doing the following:

    Code:
    sudo apt-get build-essential yasm git autogen autoconf automake libtool
    sudo apt-get build-dep mplayer
    cd /directory/where/you/downloaded/tarball
    tar xjvf mplayer2-build-2.0.tar.bz2
    cd mplayer2-build
    ./init
    make
    sudo make install
    I didn't have auto* and libtool installed even after using build-dep, so I encountered some compiler errors along the way. Once I had all the tools, mplayer2 built pretty easily. It installs to /usr/local by default; the player is /usr/local/bin/mplayer. On my 64-bit machine /usr/local/bin is a symlink to /usr/local/bin32, which appears to be something that mplayer2 created during installation. bin32 has the same timestamp as mplayer.
    Last edited by SeijiSensei; April 22nd, 2011 at 05:17 AM.

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