[packman] [PM] MPlayer 1.0rc2_r29116-2.pm.2 (openSUSE 11.1/i586)

[Lee Matheson]

I wanted to thank you for packaging mplayer and ffmpeg/libffmpeg to be
vdapu compatible. I believe vdpau offers the possibility of breathing
additional life into older computers when playing back High Defintion video.

This email is a status up date of my testing of MPlayer and vdpau
earlier today.

I tested the latest packged packman MPlayer-1.0rc2_r29116-2.pm2 earlier
today on a 9 year old PC (athlon-1100 (1GB RAM) with a new nVidia 8400GS
(512MB) PCI graphic card) running openSUSE-11.1 with KDE-3.5.10. This
old PC has a 1x/2x/4x AGP slot (no PCI-e bus). I removed the PCs nVidia
MX400 (64MB) AGP graphic card (which had been using the openGL driver
for nvidia) and replaced it with the nVidia 8400GS PCI card and then
installed the nvidia proprietary 180.44 graphic driver.

With the nVidia 8400GS, and mplayer, and the Nvidia proprietary 180.44
graphic driver, this old PC was able to smoothly play back 2 of the
H.264 trailer videos from this web site that I tried:
http://www.h264info.com/clips.html

The two videos were Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - 720p
Trailer, and Serenity - 720p “On HD DVD” Trailer. It had problems with a
3rd video trailer: I Am Legend - 1080p Trailer (more on that later).

For example, with MPlayer, playing Serenity on the 9-year old
athlon-1100 with the 8400GS and vdpau, the video played smoothly, and
the athlon-1100 CPU load of mplayer was only 4% to 5% load. Trying to
play without vdpau on that old PC results in the video freezing. Playing
the same Serenety video on a 5-year old athlon-2800 (2GB) with nVidia
FX5200 AGP (128MB RAM) and openSUSE-11.1/KDE-3.5.10 with MPlayer
resulted in 75% cpu being used by mplayer and 18% Xorg and the video
played jerkey with a massive audio/video desynch (ie not watchable
without vdpau capable card/software on the athlon-2800). Playing the
same Serenety video on an Intel Core2 Duo P8400 with Radeon HD3450
(openSUSE-11.1/KDE-3.5.10) with MPlayer resulted in 70% cpu from mplayer
and a smooth video playback.

The downside to this was the nVida 8400GS 180.44 proprietary graphic
driver was very unstable on KDE-3.5.10 on the athlon-1100 doing regular
(non-multimedia related) functions. I was not able to get more than a
couple of hours operation with out the graphics failing and a reboot
being required. On KDE4 the proprietary was mostly non-functional with
only minute or two of operation before a freeze on KDE4. Hence the PC is
debatably not useful with this lack of stability, and hopefully nVidia
will continue to improve the stability of their driver.

When using the VESA driver with the nVidia 8400 GS on this old
athlon-1100 PC, the PC is stable, but very slow (slower than the MX400
AGP card with the openGL driver).

Its possible this new 8400GS graphic card is not completely compatible
with the old PCI bus on this athlon-1100, and in a week or two I hope to
try it out on the slightly newer (5 year old) athlon-2800 PC mentioned
above.

On the web site noted, the I Am Legend - 1080p Trailer would run on
mplayer for about 10 seconds and then fail, with a series of errors,
such as:
[vdpau] failed VDPAU decoder rendering: An invalid handle value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_video_mixer_render : An invalid handle
value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_device_destroy : An invalid handle value
was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling vdp_presentation_queue_display : An invalid
handle value was provided
[vdapu] Error when calling
vdp_presentation_queue_block_until_surface_idle : An invalid handle
value was provided

But given NONE of these videos could be played BEFORE the 8400GS card
using MPlayer with vdpau was installed, this is a big improvement.

Thank you again for your efforts in this.

Lee
aka oldcpu