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

[Lee Matheson]

I forgot to mention that when I obtained the many VDPAU errors, the
video would stop playing with a solid green screen in MPlayer , and
audio would continue.  Surfing on the web (especially on the nVidia
MPlayer page) I see may other users have reported this green
screen/VDPAU error behaviour.

With further testing, I also obtained the same VDPAU errors and green
screen failures (anywhere from seconds to minutes into the video) with
MPlayer and VDPAU when playing back a standard DVD compliant MPEG2 file
(720x480, NTSC (29.97 fps), 2.845Mb/sec). Those failures are not too
serious from a practical perspective, as those videos can be played
without VDPAU on the same graphic card (albeit without VDPAU there is
75% CPU load as opposed to 5% CPU load with VDPAU).  But given DVD
compliant MPEG2 format is quite common, this may affect more users
attempting to use VDPAU.

Again this testing is on an Athlon-1100 (1GB) with a BFG nVidia 8400GS
(512MB) PCI card and MPlayer-1.0rc2_r29116-2.pm2 with the nVidia
proprietary 180.44 graphic driver. 

I also have the same MPlayer version running on two other (non VDPAU
capable) PCs and it is still running great !  So well done in marrying
the nominal with some experimental inside.

I do appreciate your efforts in this VDPAU area, and I hope that both
the nVidia and the ffmpeg/MPlayer developers are able to produce a
stable solution.  When the High Definition videos play well on such an
old PC (with only 5% of MPlayer CPU loading) its truly amazing,
especially when PCs 3x to 10x faster have 75% MPlayer CPU loading and
may or may not smoothly play the video.

Many thanks for your packaging here.

Lee
aka oldcpu

Lee Matheson wrote:
> 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
>
>