No video support for AVCHD still?

[tehowe]

Sorry I don't know for ATI/AMD GPU.
Those other posters are the experts.
I just know it's broken.

I don't know - has anyone had a painless experience for video playing/editing with an NVIDIA GTX-470 or GTX-480? If so, I may just go buy one. Even if it is loud and hot.

But I may not need to as mysteriously Mplayer/Totem started playing a very few selected file formats... It still won't play an .avi but I accidentally played a .mov video encoded with h.264 and this time around, it worked!

The only thing I can think of is that I launched KDEnlive a few minutes prior and closed it again. Could it have sorted something out?

SMPlayer now has a 'vaapi' entry under output drivers, and works though I'll stick with VLC as it's faster for video playback for now.

The only obstacle then to Ubuntu bliss is to get PiTiVi or equivalent working. I figured PiTiVi should be the easiest one to get going as it runs off of Gstreamer, so I went and compiled and installed the gstreamer-vaapi driver, which was easier than I thought despite the fact the author didn't include compile instructions on that page, a standard ./configure, make, and sudo checkinstall worked fine.

However when I drag the h264 video onto PiTiVi it says "No packages with the requested plugins found. The requested plugins are: video/x-vaapi-surface-encoder"

Dragging an .mts file, or AVCHD as it's otherwise known, over to PiTiVi resulted in

URI:00045-9CE13D9B.MTS
Problem:An internal error occurred while analyzing this file: Internal data flow error.
Extra information:gstbasesrc.c(2550): gst_base_src_loop (): /GstPipelineiscoverer-file:///media/Data/Media/Video/20101227_ScienceCentre/00045-9CE13D9B.MTS/GstFileSrc:src-file:///media/Data/Media/Video/20101227_ScienceCentre/00045-9CE13D9B.MTS:
streaming task paused, reason not-negotiated (-4)

I think I'm getting closer. It may not look it, but since Ubuntu sees fit to start working arbitrarily I feel entitled to to have a gut feeling about it.

[BicyclerBoy]

Every nvidia/mythtv XBMC user has had mostly painless experiences of HD video playback for the last 2 years.

I have only used PiTiVi for mpeg2 video files..

Editing is not the same as playing when you are using hardware for video decode playback..
All the VAAPI stuff is a waste of time for editing..& 2nd rate for playback.
It only lets you reduce the CPU load.
The best playback PQ comes from VDPAU or full CPU decode with post-filters.

The FOSS for non-linear editing of H264 using video GPU for decode/encode is a way off.
So a over-powered GPU may be pointless, you are better off with 64 bit multi-core & lots of RAM.
Nvidia GPU Vdpau may not go faster than x2.. an i5 CPU should do x4 real-time.

Some argue the gains are will never be so great due to volume of data to move back out the frame buffer to system RAM.

H264 video is highly compressed & it is only easy to cut at a key (I) frame.
Converting video to an intermediate format of all I frames will be faster to edit but huge!
AFAIK Professional non-linear video editing is not done using H264.

AVI is just a container & not a very good one for seeking.
m2ts is the container commonly used by handi-cams.

From what I have read, the data streams made by the some cameras are not correct, bad time info non-monotonic time stamps etc..

Did you try to re-mux the files with VLC or ffmpeg into the same container ?

I have an idea that ffmpeg will not re-mux with (-vcodec copy) H264 full-stop.

[tehowe]

Every nvidia/mythtv XBMC user has had mostly painless experiences of HD video playback for the last 2 years.

I have only used PiTiVi for mpeg2 video files..
...
The FOSS for non-linear editing of H264 using video GPU for decode/encode is a way off.
So a over-powered GPU may be pointless, you are better off with 64 bit multi-core & lots of RAM.
Nvidia GPU Vdpau may not go faster than x2.. an i5 CPU should do x4 real-time.
...
AFAIK Professional non-linear video editing is not done using H264.

AVI is just a container & not a very good one for seeking.
m2ts is the container commonly used by handi-cams.

I'll try that, thanks. Happily, I did buy a fast CPU, the only PITA is that I've several gigs of video to edit, batch converting (remuxing) them to a seperate location is going to be huge in MPEG2. Time for a new drive...

All the VAAPI stuff ... only lets you reduce the CPU load.
The best playback PQ comes from VDPAU or full CPU decode with post-filters.

I infer that there's some functional difference between VA-API and VDPAU then? I thought they did the same thing but had different levels of support.

From what I have read, the data streams made by the some cameras are not correct, bad time info non-monotonic time stamps etc..

I hope that's not the case with this Sony. Or maybe it's set up this way to force you to buy Vegas :/

[BicyclerBoy]

I'm not sure/don't know what the best video format is for editing..

The editing problem with H264 is that cuts can only be made at I frames unless you recompute a new I frame & following P & B frames.
Maybe a H264 format with no B frames ?

Cinelerra looks to be the most powerful Linux video editing app.

AFAIK
VA-API playback with VLC (for example) can not control the feature set C VDPAU options of hqscaling, denoise, sharpen, colorspace or buffersize.

I think VLC with full CPU decode is far superior to VA-API cos you can use yadifx2 lancroz or bicubic scaling & other filters etc.

I think it is possible that some of the non-monotonic data packet errors could be just poorly (simple) implemented parsing/demuxing.