MP4 video from phone works in Win7, not in Ubuntu

[frone]

Howdy all! I have tried to narrow the scope of this one as best as I can. I am taking videos with my phone (specifically a Droid3), which are saved in MP4 format. They seem to work great when viewed on the phone, but on the computer they were always extremely choppy for the first second or three - then just froze up and maybe spit out a new frame every ten to twenty seconds. I tried this under 10.10, 11.04, and 11.11 on more than one machine with identical results. Also made sure that I had the needed third-party codecs and tried apps like VLC, etc. with the same results.

Went ahead and purchased a new laptop which came with Win7 installed. Immediately installed 11.11 and tested the videos with the same results. Booted into the initial Win7 partition and they play perfectly. What gives?

Looking at the specs of the video in Movie Player show the following:

Video:
Dimensions: 1920x1080
Codec: H.264 / AVC
Framerate: 30 frames per second
Bitrate: 15000 kbps

Audio:
Codec: MPEG-4 AAC audio
Channels: Stereo
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bitrate: 128kbps

Hope this helps. Will be glad to give any further needed info.

Thanks!

[sudodus]

I think you have problems with your graphics driver. You may also have problems because you lack some codecs.

What graphics chip or card is there in your computer? Maybe you can activate a proprietary driver. For example nvidia works well using VDPAU to display your kind of high definition video encoded with h.264. You can use mplayer to do that.

[frone]

Thanks for the input Sudodus. I have an AMD/ATI video card and I do have the proprietary FGLRX driver installed. There is also a 'post-release updates' option for the same card in my additional drivers setup, but I have not activated it. I did install all of the third party options on install, so MP3 and such seem to work fine.

I'll try the 'post-release' and post back...

[frone]

Installation of the 'post-release' failed. Went back to the original proprietary driver.

Still scratching my head...

[Linuxisfast]

Install ffmpeg from Medibuntu, all MP4 movies play fine on Ubuntu 11.10 and older.

[frone]

THanks for the advise Linuxisfast. I currently have the GStreamer ffmpeg video plugin installed. Is this the same as the one for Mediabuntu? If not, should I remove the GStreamer one and where would I find the Mediabuntu specific one?

Thanks again...

[frone]

Did some more troubleshooting on this one with a bit more info for anyone with the ability to help.

I have found that I am able to play 640x368 H.264/AVC MP4's perfectly on both the Windows and Ubuntu partitions.

Also, 1920x1080 test videos on YouTube all fail with similar results under the Ubuntu side. When booted into Windows 7 on the same machine, these work fine as well.

Maybe this helps?

[sudodus]

My experience is that there are problems with AMD/ATI video cards in Ubuntu. (I have an ATI Radeon card that I don't use. Instead I use nvidia cards.)

I have seen in recent threads at the Ubuntu Forums, that AMD is getting better at providing drivers, but only for certain cards. So please post the specification details about your card (version number etc)! Then someone who knows about that particular card can tell you what to do.

[SeijiSensei]

It's almost certainly the video driver. Every time I read a post like this the person is using an ATI card. From what I can tell, AMD/ATI don't put anywhere near the same amount of effort into their Linux drivers as they do the Windows ones.

There is a technology called VAAPI that might help with this problem, but from a quick survey of Google items, it looks like you'd need to compile mplayer from scratch with extra development libraries even to get started. Here is a good discussion of the problems involved from an OpenSUSE user. If someone knows of an existing mplayer build for Debian/Ubuntu with VAAPI support for ATI cards, please post it here.

I never buy anything but NVIDIA for this reason.

[frone]

Sudodus -

I looked up my laptop at Lenovo. It is a ThinkPad X120e (machine type 0596) with an AMD Radeon HD 6310 for video.

SeijiSensei -

I'll have a look at the VAAPI, but it sounds a bit over my head.


Thanks all for the advise. If there is any other info I can provide please let me know...