[Howto] MPlayer with CoreAVC

[c-m]

So what is the best way to go for a netbook - Dell Mini9 or Aspire One?

Most of my content (on the server) is 720p - the netbook really struggles with files in the MKV format. Isn't coreavc meant to be the fastest the decoder out there?

[c-m]

Confused as to which guide i should be installing. I want a full gui

This guide below seems simple, but there's no gui:
https://launchpad.net/~ripps818/+archive/coreavc

[andrew.46]

I want a full gui

Try installing a frontend such as SMPlayer or UMPlayer.

[c-m]

Try installing a frontend such as SMPlayer or UMPlayer.

To work with coreavc?

[c-m]

Does this mean that mplayer used coreavc?

Either way it was far too slow. I don't understand why. A netbook should be capable of playing 720p video.

Forced video codec: coreserve
Opening video decoder: [dshowserver] DirectShowServer video codecs
[PP] Using codec's postprocessing, max q = 4.
Movie-Aspect is 1.84:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [xv] 1280x696 => 1280x696 Planar YV12 
Colorspace details not fully supported by selected vo.
dshowserver --codec CoreAVCDecoder.ax --size 1280x696 --guid 09571a4b-f1fe-4c60-9760de6d310c7c31 --fourc 0x31637661 --bits 12 --outfmt 0x32315659 --pid 7877 --id b77609a0 --numpages 10 --port 24528 &
Starting wine dshowserver.exe
Opening device (port is 24528)
len: 996
ProductVersion: 2.5.5
fixme:thread:SetThreadIdealProcessor (0x70): stub
fixme:thread:SetThreadIdealProcessor (0x74): stub
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x61ef3c,0x00000000), stub!
Decoder supports the following YUV formats: YUY2 UYVY YV12 I420 
Found DirectShow filterSelected video codec: [coreserve] vfm: dshowserver (CoreAVC DShow H264 decoder - http://corecodec.org/)
==========================================================================
==========================================================================
EINPROGRESS in connect() - selecting
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 1536.0 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 192000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [ffdca] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg DTS)
==========================================================================
AO: [pulse] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A:   0.1 V:   0.1 A-V:  0.024 ct:  0.000   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 
Decreasing video pts: 0.042000 < 0.125000
A:   0.3 V:   0.1 A-V:  0.174 ct:  0.000   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 
Decreasing video pts: 0.083000 < 0.125000
A:   5.4 V:   2.0 A-V:  3.379 ct:  0.003   0/  0 84% 19% 162.1% 50 0 


           ************************************************
           **** Your system is too SLOW to play this!  ****
           ************************************************

Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
  - Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
  - Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
  - Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
  - Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts,
    e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
  - Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
  - Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
  - Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

Seek now V:  73.4 A-V: -0.014 ct:  0.004   0/  0 31% 10% 37.7% 1165 0 
Seek now V:  86.2 A-V:  0.121 ct:  0.002   0/  0 53% 11% 23.5% 2 0 
Seek now V: 100.9 A-V:  1.414 ct:  0.004   0/  0 38% 16% 182.2% 24 0 
Seek now V: 118.0 A-V:  0.224 ct:  0.002   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 1 0 
Seek now V: 128.5 A-V:  0.349 ct:  0.002   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 4 0 
Seek now V: 149.0 A-V:  0.263 ct:  0.003   0/  0 30% 15% 57.0% 18 0 
Seek now V: 161.5 A-V:  0.116 ct:  0.002   0/  0 37% 14% 78.4% 13 0 
A: 192.5 V: 185.3 A-V:  7.255 ct:  0.005   0/  0 30% 17% 315.9% 86 0 
[***] PlayResX undefined, setting to 384
Destroying filter A-V: 33.387 ct:  0.004   0/  0 29% 17% 203.8% 578 0 

Exiting... (Quit)

[ripps818]

According to what I see, you were indeed using CoreAVC. But coreavc is slower than standard libav or ffmpeg these days anyway, so I don't see the point. The only reason it might be faster on Windows is because it can use CUDA on nvidia cards (maybe OpenCL too) for decoding.

In fact, I would assume that no netbook should be able to decode 720p, the CPU just isn't designed for that. And if it's advertised as saying it can, then it must be using some form of Graphics hardware decoding such as with Nvidia VDPAU or Intel VA-API. If the netbook doesn't support either of those options, than it was probably some other hardware decoding that isn't available to Linux that I know of.

If you want to coax a few more cpu cycles in mplayer, make sure to be using these flags:

-lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all

Also, depending on you graphics card and drivers, different video outputs may be faster. Try using:

-vo xv
-vo gl:yuv2
-vo gl:yuv=2:ati-hack:force-pbo -dr
-vo gl2

[c-m]

According to what I see, you were indeed using CoreAVC. But coreavc is slower than standard libav or ffmpeg these days anyway, so I don't see the point.

I'm not sure about that, playback, although still slow, is faster when using mplayer with coreavc for me than with whatever mplayer uses as default.

When i first had my aspire one, there where plenty of youtube videos and reviews where people had enjoyed success playing 720p videos in windows with coreavc.

I'm going to buy a broadcom crystal HD card anyway, so this is just for fun.

[footspa]

An update of Mplayer2 was made available today so I proceeded to do that. Now Mplayer won't play any kind of files.

After re-installing Mplayer2 I get the error message "Mplayer interrupted by signal 4 in module: demux_open". Initially I got the error message "Mplayer interrupted by signal 4 in module: init_video_code".

[ripps818]

An update of Mplayer2 was made available today so I proceeded to do that. Now Mplayer won't play any kind of files.

After re-installing Mplayer2 I get the error message "Mplayer interrupted by signal 4 in module: demux_open". Initially I got the error message "Mplayer interrupted by signal 4 in module: init_video_code".

The mplayer2 packages I have in my coreavc-for-ubuntu PPA seem to work fine here in 12.04 beta. All my h.264 videos work using vdpau,xv,gl. Just using the built-in libav codecs to decode the video.

From the looks of the error it's having trouble finding a codec or demuxer for the video your trying to play. Can you give me more details about your mplayer and what files your trying to play? Where are you installing your mplayer2 from? What version of Ubuntu are you using?

If this is a CoreAVC problem, I can't help you. The coreavc-for-linux project is dead and I've been doing my best to keep the patches working despite that. But I'm not a programmer and I can't fix it if stops working.

Also, it would probably be wise to contact the mplayer2 developer, uau, at #mplayer2 on irc.ubuntu.com.

[imsety]

Hi, I just tried to install mplayer from the PPA but I got the following error:

sudo apt-get install mplayer
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 mplayer : Depends: mplayer2 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Any idea what the problem might be?