Aha, not a prob this time ,

Okay, mplayer is great, but...on my 600mhz peg1 with a Voodoo3 16mb fullscreen dvd/DiVx playback is not exactly an option. Well, it is actually, but it's to slow. Is it possible to get Mplayer to play a movie at al lower resolution? I tried the -x -y option, but that just made the playback screen smaller, not the movie. Suggestions anyone?

If not possible, then would a Radeon 9000 make a big difference? Okay, sounds like a stupid question, but I don't no wheter the cpu or the videocard does all the calculation.

Thanx again (and again, and again....it's going to be a long week )

Stevo

Hi !

If you mean that the sound and the video are no more sync then you can try to add "FRAMEDROP" in the tooltypes.

When using Overlay (default setting), any Divx should be played fine. Only DVD are a bit slow a G3.

Bye

Hi!

I have the same system with the same graphics card, and
looking (DivX) movies is working good (also with FRAMEDROP
option).

When you give no argument for the screen size, mplayer will
show the movie in a window on ambient screen.
Hitting key f will switch to best available fullscreen mode.

Greets! _coliN_

Hi guys, thanx for the reply, but...

I know about the framdrop option, but dvd playback is still slow. I really would like to know if I can get the resolution down (that should improve playback) or if another videocard (radeon 9000) would improve playback.

Stevo

ps. my voodoo is a pci card, so that could explain why playback on _colin_ 's peggie is somewhat smoother

DVD's don't play too smoothly on my Pegasos either (With Radeon 9100) BUT if you don't mind dropping some frames, you can watch them (I watch them mostly on my PS2 anyway)

DVD playback should be a lot faster on G4 Pegasos 2

Hello

Mplayer with my Peg2 G4 is fantastic with Voodoo 3500agp card. I also have a Radeon 7000 PCI card installed and it runs fullscreen fulls speed perfect sync. I do have to say the Radeon overlay display looks dithered and the Voodoo looks smoother. The Voodoo also has better blacks.

On my Peg1 G3 v3500 i was getting accetable plackback of dvd, but it was a touch slow. But still looked great. I think the drive is an important factor here. I use an LG 8161b 16x DVD Rom drive. It has great Linux support and Mplayer likes it very much.

magnetic

Hi !

Using a lower resolution will not improve the playback speed.

However, some DVD drive have strange behavior with MPlayer and it
result a very slow playback.

Bye

Hi Stevo,
on ather OSes like Windoze the DVD playback is done by the GFX board useing its built in "mpeg hardware decodeing" feature. So you have fast and wonderfull playback also on slow (cpu <=300Mhz too..) machines. MorphOS sadly has TOTALLY no support for mpeg hardware decodeing of gfx board. So even if you change your voodoo with a Radeon 9000 or 9100 or 9800XT (!!) things will not change. It is your cpu to do all the work.

Oh dear, just what I was afraid of

Any chance future updates of MorpOS/CGX will make use of mpeg decoding abilities of the Radeon cards?

Still I wonder; would having an AGP card instead of a PCI card (like I have) speed things up? Even though calculation is done by the cpu, video transfer rate to the video card should be faster on an AGP card.

And...NicoPPC said that lowering the resolution wouldn't help, but since decreasing the resolution of mplayer while playing a DiVx movie (by scaling the window...wich won't work with dvds) does improve playback speed, I wonder.

Stevo

I tried a zone 2 Futurama DVD on peg II G4, with a voodoo 3 3000 AGP :

in overlay mode, it's smooth, but it looks a bit bad due to the lack of multi buffering. I hope it's planned :) (particularly in such a cartoon)

in VMEM mode, it's quite slow but still viewable.

I don't understand why it is so slow. Is it a mplayer / voodoo driver / etc. issue ? Or is it just due to the 100% software decoding ? I remember playing a DVD on an old celeron 400 with a riva TNT 1 video card... I guess there's a form of hardware acceleration in all cards then ?

(BTW thanks again Nico, everything work !!)

PS : I'm refering to an encrypted DVD... DivX movies in hi res have always been perfectly smooth even on peg I G3 of course)

- mahen

@ Mahen
Yes, your old and slow Celeron 400 perfectly showed DVDs because also an old Riva TNT has DVD hardware playback and Windoze supports it.

@Stevo
I don't think useing a PCI or AGP GFX board changes the speed. The PegasosII AGP is only 1x speed and it should be built on PCI bus (correct me if I'm wrong), so there should be not so big difference.
I'm useing a Radeon7000PCI in this moment and it doesn't seems slower than the Radeon 8500 AGP I had before (notice that Radeon 8500 is absolutely the FASTEST Radeon you can use on Pegasos, much faster than 9200, 9000PRO, 9100=8500LE..)

Okay now a week later,

I'm having trouble with keeping the sound in sync with the video. I've tried the -framedrop option, I've tried the autosync=0 (up to 5) option, I've tried playing the darn files from my hd instead of cd, but alas!

DVD's and DivX movies alike. Some start well, but somewhere along the movie speech falls behind. Some movies have this problem instantly. Usage of above mentioned options have some effect, but not enough.

Okay, maybe it's normal that my peg1 can't cope with these files, but since other users report that are having no problems with their playback using the -framedrop option, I wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

grtz,
Stevo

Quote:

That's not true. No current cheap VGA card has features for complette MPEG, or MPEG2 decoding. However, they support things like color space conversion, or some support for delta processing, which help a lot.

The only card on Amiga (incl. Pegasos) which supports things like these (and also has driver and software support for it) is still the good old PicassoIV...

Also don't forget that x86 CPU's has SIMD (MMX and the like) instruction sets since 150Mhz+, which also means a _HUGE_ speed boost for streaming video decoding. On Pegasos, you still have to use the default PPC instruction set, even on a G4, since MorphOS does not support SIMD (Altivec) yet.

Hi Stevo,


Well, I can only speak about my experiences with animations using different gfx-cards.
Using my Voodoo3 (PCI) I was not able to keep video and sound in sync when playing bigger (as in resolution 640x480 and higher) animations.
Using a Radeon 7000VE (AGP) mplayer had no problem with the sync - although I used the same tooltypes as with my Voodoo.

As for DVD-playback - I borrowd one some time ago, but can't remember anymore which gfx-card I had installed at this time - there was a difference whether I started playback using the appropriate tooltypes/shell-parameters (DVD_DEVICE,....) which was rather slow or I used the CD interface of the DVD where playback was significantly faster.


Bye HAK

@ HAK,

Thank you for your reply; it is good to know that the animation/audio sync problem can be solved by using a AGP Radeon instead of my Voodoo PCI. I don't really understand what you mean with this though:
Quote:

@ Stevo,

Well, what I ment was that there are two ways how to play DVDs.

The first one is to directly enter the necessary tooltypes in the mplayer icon or as parameter when starting mplayer by shell (e.g. mplayer -dvd <track-number> -dvd-device <device>:<unit>)

The second one is by using the filerequester of mplayer and selecting the track you wish to play (WARNING: The following explanation is due to my limited knowledge on DVD and may be seriously wrong. Anyone with a better understanding feel free to correct me).
This is possible because the DVD filesystem also includes an ISO-9660 filesystem for backwards-compatibility.
(That's what I ment with "CD interface" in my first posting).

Using the latter one mplayer played DVDs faster then when using the first one.


Bye HAK

Spooky :)

I'll give it a try and post my findings here, but I'm puzzled how it should make playback faster....file vs. track playback -> stay tuned!

@HAK,

Hmmmm,

Well, all I could come up with are the actual files that the dvd-movie is composed of; the .vob files. But when I select them with the filerequester of mplayer, it instantly reports a read/write error. I must be doing something wrong here, suggestions?

grtz, stevo

@ Stevo,

Hm, I assume you tried the same DVD with the track playback also.
If not please do so and check whether this one also fails.

If yes, then the DVD may be copy protected and mplayer can't handle it.
If it does work the other way around, I'm afraid I can't help you as I don't have the DVD-Writer anymore and therefore can't check it here anymore.

Only thing I can think of is that you changed the tooltypes of the mplayer icon (e.g. activated track playback this way) and this one might interfere with the file playback.

Would also be interesting to know which DVD (Name and Zone) you tried to play so if you are lucky and someone also has this one can check the behaviour on his computer.


Bye HAK

I'm chiming in because I want an ARexx port in this port! I want to play my movies sideways and backwards using a heap of arexx commands! Yeah!

I finally started using Frogger (didn't need it before because mplayer is really good) and came to the conclusion that Frogger is rather good to, but it sure crashes a lot more than mplayer.

Point is, that while mplayer seems to have to have a problem with synchronizing the audio and video with certain DivX/DVD movies, frogger does not. This implies that it's indeed a problem in the software, not in the hardware (see earlier posts in this thread).

ps.

Targhan, how do you set the dvd-device for toad's dvd-playback option? Tried the cdd and cdu tooltypes for frogger, but that didn't seem to do much.

One problem I had (Peg II, G4, Voodoo 3500 agp) was in 1280 x1024 playback of all video type, gave 5 verticle lines in mplayer. If I changed resolution to 800x600, everything was perfect.

You may see some improvements in 800x600, good luck...

Matt

Quote:

given this logic, it could be presumed, that macOSX thru MOL would be your solution to altivec support

ChainQ

Speaking of Mplayer and DIVX/MPEG what every happened with the ENglish Sub version of your TV appearences? We have all been waiting for a couple of months? Please please?

As Far as Mplayer goes:

Like I said before the drive matters too afaik. I recommend
LG 8161B for best performance and it plays encrypted np

Of course gfx card speed does matter... and Miky there is a speed diff between agp and pci naturally.

magnetic

I just tried a 512x208 pixel DivX movie using the latest Frogger on my
Pegasos II G3 and playback is smooth, while playback with MPlayer is
not perfectly smooth. I first thought my Radeon 7500 is to slow, but
now I know that MPlayer still needs some optimizations to run
perfectly. The strange thing is that MPlayer only needs 30% CPU time,
so the problem doesn't seem to be my G3 but some bug/problem in
MPlayer.