[MPlayer-users] Trouble playing HD Windows Media

[Corey Hickey]

Jeff Cook wrote:
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> I'm having problems playing a few high-definition Windows Media movies
> with mplayer. First off, the video is not scaled to match my display;
> I'm running 1024x768 at the moment and these files are higher resolution
> than that. The video does not scale unless I enter fullscreen.

I'm not sure why you would expect the video to be downscaled by default; 
mplayer doesn't upscale unless you tell it to, either.

Actually, there is a bug somewhere when playing the hd wmv files I've 
seen -- the aspect ratio is wrong. Such files are not actually HD 
resolution: they're 1440x1080 instead of 1920x1280 and need to be 
upscaled horizontally or the aspect ratio is incorrect. I don't know if 
it's an mplayer bug; I've been too lazy to investigate it, so that's my 
fault. The workaround is to use '-aspect 1920:1080' to force the scaling.

> Somewhere between five or fifteen seconds into the file (depending on
> the file), I'll get a message like this:
> 
> "A:  13.1 V:  13.1 A-V:  0.014 ct:  0.121  62/ 62  8%  8%  0.8% 0 0
> Too many video packets in the buffer: (184 in 8500986 bytes).
> Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?
> For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option."
> 
> and my sound'll cut out. It is occassionally accompanied by a header
> informing me that my system may be too slow to play the file (it's not;
> it's an Athlon 64 3200+ w/ 1GB RAM in dual channel).  The video
> continues to play at full res and without noticeable problems. Sometimes
> if I seek through it sound will come back at certain parts. This does
> not happen every time and does not happen if I don't seek.

That does indeed sound like your system is too slow, but I agree that an 
Athlon64 3200+ should be more than enough. We'll see.

> This is occurring within a 32-bit chroot on an AMD64 installation. Other
> HD Windows Media files play fine in it. It happens with both the binary
> provided by the testing repository at debian-multimedia.org and the CVS
> version I compiled and tried directly before sending this.
> 
> The files are:
> callofduty3_trailer-highdef.wmv from
> http://www.fileplanet.com/163225/160000/fileinfo/Call-of-Duty-3-E3-2006-Trailer-%5BHigh-Res%5D
> 169_biahh_om_mul_050706_hd.wmv at
> http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/brothersinarms3/media.html:  Brothers
> In Arms Hell's Highway Official Movie 1; subscriber only HD video.
> brothersarms3_ot_mul_050106_hd.wmv at
> http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/brothersinarms3/media.html: Brothers
> In Arms Hell's Highway Official Trailer 1; subscriber only HD video.
> Maybe it has something to do with World War II. :p

Ick, I can't get to those files. Picking through a bunch of 
subscriber-only webpages to download a file is beyond the attention span 
of most of us. Please do one of these:

1. Upload the file to your anonymous http/ftp server if you have one.
2. Upload the file to ftp://ftp.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/incoming.
3. Try to find a publically available file that has the same problem.

-Corey