Pure video = VDPAU ?

[sl1pkn07]

if my 7950GX2 lifting the head....

[ticket]

Originally Posted by Lysius

Perhaps in another three and a half years...

The article is over 3 years ago (but maybe you knew that .... !)

[Lysius]

Originally Posted by ticket

The article is over 3 years ago (but maybe you knew that .... !)

That's why I wrote "another".


I don't think Geforce 6/7 will see any new features on linux. I also think they will be transfered to a legacy driver in less than a year.

[ticket]

Originally Posted by mooninite

It's not Linux that's at fault. Your card will not do H.264 decoding in the GPU. If you won't believe me then go see it for yourself. Go download a 1080p trailer and run it on Windows. Watch your CPU usage hit 100% and the video stutter. I'm sure you'll blow that off as to not having the drivers installed correctly or some other unrelated nonsense just to prove your point.

Well I tried your suggestion. I couldn't quite make a fair comparison, as i don't have a dual boot setup. Anyway here's what I did, with the results:

I tried a little experiment to compare video playback performance between Jaunty 9.04 and Windows XP.

The comparison wasn't totally fair, but I was surprised how badly Jaunty did. A fair comparison should be done with a dual boot machine. What I had to hand, however, were two Dell machines, one a little old, the other older. Here are their specs:

Oldest PC, running Ubuntu 9.04:
- Intel P4 1.5GHz
- 512MB RAM
- GeForce 6200 PCI, 180.44 nVidia driver
- 1440x900 LCD monitor

Somewhat newer PC, running Windows XP SP3:
- AMD Sempron 3400+ 1.8GHz
- 512MB RAM
- GeForce 6150LE, HyperTransport, integrated
- 1024x768 LCD monitor

The machines are not wildly different in their specs. The Windows graphics card may have the edge on bus bandwith, but its fill rate is less than the 6200 on Jaunty:

fill rates:
GeForce 6150LE 425 MP/s
GeForce 6200 600 MP/s

Also the 6200 has better 3D performance according to the specs, but we are only comparing 2D performance in this 'test'.

I used two video files:
MP4(H.264) 25 fps 1280x720
WMV(v9 advanced) 24 fps 1920x816

On the Windows machine I used Windows media player to play the WMV file, and the latest quicktime player to play the MP4 file.

On the Jaunty machine I used the latest mplayer build (from svn). Compiz was switched off. No filters were used. mttr was set correctly.


On Jaunty, the MP4 file played smoothly, but its smoothness was simply because it was playing the video back in slow motion! However, the audio was racing ahead, so the sound and video were totally out of sync. The same happened when playing in a window and in full screen mode.

On Windows, quicktime played the video flawlessly, no matter how I set the view, e.g. in full screen, fit to window, zoom of 1 (when it would not fit into the monitor screen).


Next I tried the wmv. I fully expected the Windows machine to choke, but no - it played back almost flawlessly! There was a slight, very occasional stutter now and then, nevertheless the video was most certainly watchable and enjoyable.

On Jaunty, the wmv was again in slow motion, but this time the video was also stuttering. The sound sputtered and eventually gave up. I tried using OSS for the sound driver instead of pulse - slight improvement in sound for the first few seconds, then stuttering badly. Basically, it was unwatchable.

Just to rub salt in the wounds, the Windows machine could play normal resolution youtube videos in full screen with no problem at all. In Jaunty, full screen flash became a slide show, which was troublesome to stop (hit escape key and wait, wait ...)

My experiment was really (to some extent) testing the differences between the OS's and the graphics drivers (no firefox and flash in the loop). It seems to indicate that there is a problem with the nVidia / xorg drivers on Jaunty or Linux in general.

As I said, it is not a totally fair comparison, but I was amazed all the same. Perhaps someone can do the same tests using a dual boot system?

[cehoyos]

Originally Posted by ticket

On Jaunty, the MP4 file played smoothly, but its smoothness was simply because it was playing the video back in slow motion! However, the audio was racing ahead, so the sound and video were totally out of sync. The same happened when playing in a window and in full screen mode.

On Windows, quicktime played the video flawlessly

Last time I looked, Quicktime always activated the equivalent of -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:skipframe=nonref (which will allow you to play the video with mplayer on your P4).

The comparison is not completely fair, because imo (and especially for video decoding) the Sempron performs much better than any P4 (even a faster one). You could download a pre-compiled mplayer executable for windows (that is less optimized than would be possible) and I believe it will also succeed playing the videos (at least the H264 sample, I never had frame loss for Apple 720 trailers on a 2GHz Athlon).

I wonder if WMP can use the fact that your screen has a much lower resolution than your sample: For some codecs (not H264 and VC1), this knowledge can be used by MPlayer (lowres) and reduces decoding time by a large factor.

CPU usage in windows would be useful.

Carl Eugen

PS: No, unfortunately, skiploopfilter and skipframe do not - yet - work for VC1.

[mooninite]

Originally Posted by ticket

Well I tried your suggestion.

No you did not. You downloaded a 720p trailer. I said a 1080p trailer. Totally different ballpark. Try again. Also open up Task Manager and include a screenshot with the video playing and the CPU usage level showing.

I can't believe you spend all this time trying this stuff on 1998 hardware. You're as bad as some of my customers at work.

[Sky777]

Originally Posted by crisalide

VDPAU already provides some postprocessing features: color space adjustments, deinterlacing (up to 50i->50p temporal spatial), sharpening, noise reduction.

does temporal support 50i--->50p ?
does bob and half temporal half_temporal spatial support 50i--->25p ?

is it correct ?

[crisalide]

Originally Posted by Sky777

does temporal support 50i--->50p ?
does bob and half temporal half_temporal spatial support 50i--->25p ?

is it correct ?

Bob, Temporal and Temporal_Spatial are 50i->50p.
half_xxxx are 50i->25p.

[ticket]

Well, the problem appears that my P4 is just too old to play!

I used a knoppix live cd to boot the windoze machine. Thanks to the knoppix guys, their live cd has a recent mplayer that can play wmv and mp4 files. When I played the test files, there were no problems at all. Some things to note, however, were that the monitor resolution was stuck at 800x600 and there was no sound. No amount of fiddling could fix that. Also compiz couldn't be enabled for some reason, so I guess I wasn't using an nvidia driver. I wasn't able to install a flash player, so I couldn't test that aspect. So apart form the untested flash, both windows XP and and Linux have the same (good) performance on the Sempron/6150LE machine.

When trying knoppix on my Intel/6200 PC, I got the same problems with the test videos as before (slow motion & stuttering).

If the knoppix CD is not using nvidia drivers, then this means nvidia drivers are not the cause of my problems on the older 6200 machine. And neither is the Linux architecture, it seems.

The problem simply points to the hardware on the older machine. Now both machines have CPUs that aren't too different in performance (but I note your comment, cehoyos) so the problem appears to lie in the 6200 graphics card and its interface, or that the 6150LE is somehow much better than the 6200. Maybe the limited bandwidth of a PCI card is the problem. The Intel PC does have a spare slot for an AGP x4 card, but these type of cards seem rare these days.

It would be a shame to dump the Intel 1.5GHz machine for the sake of better video performance, but that may be the only other option left.

[ticket]

Originally Posted by mooninite

I can't believe you spend all this time trying this stuff on 1998 hardware. You're as bad as some of my customers at work.

Thank you mooninite, you're such a sweet, kind person. I bet your customers love you!

[cehoyos]

Originally Posted by ticket

Well, the problem appears that my P4 is just too old to play!

You can use a Geforce 8400 to play any kind of H264 / VC1 / MPEG1/2 1080 video with that CPU.

Now both machines have CPUs that aren't too different in performance

That is, as you kindly proved (I was not as sure as I claimed to be), wrong!

so the problem appears to lie in the 6200 graphics card and its interface, or that the 6150LE is somehow much better than the 6200.

Certainly not, they both support xv (as good or better than a Geforce 4), gl (probably with yuv=2 support which Geforce 4 can't do) and xvmc, but not hardware accelerated H264 or VC1 decoding.

Carl Eugen

[ticket]

Originally Posted by cehoyos

You can use a Geforce 8400 to play any kind of H264 / VC1 / MPEG1/2 1080 video with that CPU.
Carl Eugen

Thank you cehoyos! I will go shopping! sky777 has already kindly provided me in this thread with a good shopping list for PCI vdpau cards (no any AGP cards):


Sparkle SF-PC84GS512U2LP-P

EVGA 512-P1-N724-LR GeForce 8400 GS 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Video Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130451

http://www.albatron.ru/top/it/vga


PNY VERTO 8400GS PCI 512MB-64BIT DDR2 DVI+D VCG84512SPEB
http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/de...-Video%20Cards

Jaton Nvidia Geforce 8400gs Pci 512mb Ddr2 2port Dvi Hdtv Low Profile
http://www.costcentral.com/proddetai...PCIDLP/V24084/

BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS 512MB PCI
http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr84512gsp.aspx

PCI nVIDIA 8400 GS 512MB Low Profile Video Card 512
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-PCI-nVIDIA-8...3A1|240%3A1318