Short Term Movie Playing Hack Anyone?


skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
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www.codejedi.com
How are folks watching video on their Pandora?

Transcoding and using the default player? using mplayer from the command line?

The below is entirely irrelevent once we get around to hardware decoding :) But for _right now_ and for _lazy folks_ ...

On occasion I've been using this (more or less) from the terminal:
mplayer -ao oss -fs -x 480 -y 320 <filename>

- after of course heading up to 800mhz (can't go too high or the SD driver gets confused sometimes)

-fs means to (software) scale to fullscreen (could also use -zoom etc)
-x and -y are for setting the size; less pixels out seems to help it render faster
Theres a -framedrop option to let it drop frames, not sure if it helps
-ao oss -- seems to help the framerate in OSS audio mode

Now, something you can do is use -vo to specify the video go direct to framebuffer which gets you a few more FPS, but draws in the top left (I don't recall what happens if you use -fs and fbdev in framerate terms.)

One thing you can do to get a few more FPS is to use the hw scaler --
- direct mplayer to use framebuffer, and a smaller size (like 480x320 above)
- use ofbset to have the system scale up the image to fullscreen

The best way to do this is to make a sh-script that does this all in one fell swoop .. "mplayer-wrapper.sh <filename>" that does the ofbset, runs mplayer, and sets the scaler off again when over. (This is good for if mplayer crashes too, so the sh-script wrapper fixes everything up afterwards.)

To improve it again, could wrap such a player-script as a pnd-file, and even include a few variations of it (different resolutions to render to perhaps.)

I've got some video files transcoded to PSP and such which work fine (they're lower res anyway), but for untranscoded files the above quite often gets me satisfactory results.

If this is actually useful info (big if!), can someone..
1) verify on a few video files that at 800mhz + mplayer various options above == satisfactory framerates that default settings in mplayer or totem do not
2) let us know if this is a useful idea.

if (1) + (2) can be confirmed, its not hard to put together a short pnd-file to do all this; run the pnd from the menu, get the usual goofy GTK file picker (or my goofy wallpapers picker), pick a file, and have it run full screen scaled (hardware.)

*just a thought I had a few weeks ago*

*shrug*

jeff

This might be entirely redundant against something else, but I've not followed video playing threads :)
 
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