24 replies to this topic

[xorangekiller]

firey, have you tried MPlayer? It is the fastest, most resource-efficient media player I have tried on my PowerBook G4. Both VLC and MPlayer play 480p videos well (although VLC typically has higher CPU usage), but MPlayer alone manages to play most 720p videos with no lag. If I pass it the right switches, I can also acceptably play all 720p videos and many 1080p ones. Since the RaspberryPi's 700 MHz ARMv6 processor is much faster than my 1.5 GHz G4, you might not even need the extra options to make playback smoother. My aliases are below; I use mplayer-fast to play 720p and mplayer-really-fast to play 1080p.

alias mplayer-really-fast='mplayer -really-quiet -framedrop -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:skipframe=nonref'
alias mplayer-fast='mplayer -really-quiet -framedrop -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all'

[firey]

xorangekiller, on 29 November 2012 - 17:15, said:

firey, have you tried MPlayer? It is the fastest, most resource-efficient media player I have tried on my PowerBook G4. Both VLC and MPlayer play 480p videos well (although VLC typically has higher CPU usage), but MPlayer alone manages to play most 720p videos with no lag. If I pass it the right switches, I can also acceptably play all 720p videos and many 1080p ones. Since the RaspberryPi's 700 MHz ARMv6 processor is much faster than my 1.5 GHz G4, you might not even need the extra options to make playback smoother. My aliases are below; I use mplayer-fast to play 720p and mplayer-really-fast to play 1080p.

alias mplayer-really-fast='mplayer -really-quiet -framedrop -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:skipframe=nonref'
alias mplayer-fast='mplayer -really-quiet -framedrop -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all'

I tried mplayer. It was very choppy. If I enabled allowing frame drop the sound was perfect, but video was like 1fp20s the omxplayer is designed for the rpi so it offloads the processing to the gpu.

However, I am running it from CLI so there is no graphical boost from x or anything.

[xorangekiller]

firey, on 30 November 2012 - 01:06, said:

I tried mplayer. It was very choppy. If I enabled allowing frame drop the sound was perfect, but video was like 1fp20s the omxplayer is designed for the rpi so it offloads the processing to the gpu.

I don't have a Raspberry Pi at the moment, but my PowerBook G4 is similarly resource constrained (less so on RAM and hard disk space but definitely more so on processor and possibly video). If omxplayer is not too specific to the Raspberry Pi's hardware (mostly GPU), it sounds like it might work nicely since the ARM and PowerPC architectures are both RISC and share common design characteristics. I would really like to try it; I'm missing a killer video player for that machine. How do you have it setup on your Raspberry Pi?

[firey]

xorangekiller, on 30 November 2012 - 02:57, said:

I don't have a Raspberry Pi at the moment, but my PowerBook G4 is similarly resource constrained (less so on RAM and hard disk space but definitely more so on processor and possibly video). If omxplayer is not too specific to the Raspberry Pi's hardware (mostly GPU), it sounds like it might work nicely since the ARM and PowerPC architectures are both RISC and share common design characteristics. I would really like to try it; I'm missing a killer video player for that machine. How do you have it setup on your Raspberry Pi?

I just have Arch for arm installed on SD Card. Downloaded omxplayer off the Arch AUR and built it, works fine. Been mounting my desktop as a share and streaming via LAN. Not using any DE or anything, so it's running from the CLI.

[xorangekiller]

You can run video players directly from the command line with no WM/DE? Does it require X to be installed? I must look into this!

[firey]

xorangekiller, on 30 November 2012 - 06:11, said:

You can run video players directly from the command line with no WM/DE? Does it require X to be installed? I must look into this!

no X, no WM, no DE, no DBus.

[xorangekiller]

firey, on 30 November 2012 - 12:48, said:

no X, no WM, no DE, no DBus.

I would love links to any documentation you used to do this. I didn't know this was possible, and I really want to learn how its done, at least. Ideally I can abuse this technique in some unique ways, though.

[firey]

xorangekiller, on 30 November 2012 - 15:37, said:

I would love links to any documentation you used to do this. I didn't know this was possible, and I really want to learn how its done, at least. Ideally I can abuse this technique in some unique ways, though.

It was really nothing special. With mplayer, just run mplayer -args filename, vlc is something like vlc -I dummy filename. I just made sure to install all the codecs, and drivers that I could. omxplayer is just: omxplayer -o (output ie: hdmi) -y filename

[xorangekiller]

Thanks firey, I will try that. I have used mplayer that way before, but it has always been within an X session; I just assumed that it needed one. I will definitely be looking at omxplayer and scouring the mplayer man pages as soon as I get a chance.

[firey]

Yea I like de environments but the less load the better. My next goal is getting QT to run embedded so I can make my own launcher within the QT virtual windowing system. If I can't I will write a simple client server app and have the GUI be on my desktop and run the commands on the pi