[MPlayer-users] vaapi support in mplayer.

[Christian Dysthe]

On Wed, 2014-05-14 at 23:00 +0300, Nick Koretsky wrote:
> On Wed, 14 May 2014 21:00:03 +0200
> Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 01:22:32PM -0500, Christian Dysthe wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2014-05-14 at 12:31 +0530, Anuj Mittal wrote:
> > > > On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 10:37 PM, Christian Dysthe
> > > > <cdysthe at gmail.com>wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > On Tue, 2014-05-13 at 10:30 -0500, Lu, Ran wrote:
> > > > > > > It kind of does via libva-gl which translates VDPAU to vaapi.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I tried libvdpau-va-gl, and for some reason it actually uses much
> > > > > > higher gpu
> > > > > > than the vaapi patch mplayer. I guess it is the overhead from
> > > > > > rendering
> > > > > > everything through opengl. When playing hi-res movies it kind of
> > > > > > defeating the
> > > > > > purpose to use va-gl since xv uses pretty much the same power.
> > > > > > while mplayer-
> > > > > > vaapi (or vdpau with a nvidia card) can really reduce the the
> > > > > > power consumption by half or more.
> > > > >
> > > > > I tried mplayer-vaapi on my Ubuntu 14.04 i7/Intel 4000 graphics
> > > > > laptop, but the playback was jerky across the board regardless of
> > > > > output and video format. mplayer packaged for Ubuntu works great,
> > > > > so something is wrong with the current mplayer-vaapi build for
> > > > > 14.04.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > Can you paste here the mplayer-vaapi command line that you used? Do
> > > > you have the libva intel driver installed?
> > > 
> > > This is getting a bit more complicated. I am using SMPlayer which feeds
> > > this to mplayer:
> > > 
> > > /usr/bin/mplayer -noquiet -nofs -nomouseinput -sub-fuzziness 1 -identify
> > > -slave -vo vaapi -ao pulse -nokeepaspect -nodr -nodouble -input
> > > nodefault-bindings:conf=/dev/null -stop-xscreensaver -wid 73400361
> > > -monitorpixelaspect 1 -ass -embeddedfonts -ass-line-spacing 0
> > > -ass-font-scale 1 -noflip-hebrew
> > > -ass-styles /home/christian/.config/smplayer/styles.ass
> > > -subfont-autoscale 0 -subfont-osd-scale 20 -subfont-text-scale 20 -subcp
> > > ISO-8859-1 -vid 0 -aid 0 -subpos 100 -volume 100 -cache 2048 -ss 351
> > > -osdlevel 0 -vf-add screenshot -noslices -channels 2 -af
> > > scaletempo,equalizer=0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0 -softvol -softvol-max
> > > 110 /path/to/movie.mkv
> > > 
> > > The playback is jerky with mplayer-vaapi in SMPlayer
> > > 
> > > Then I tried with the simple command: mplayer -vo
> > > vaapi /path/to/movie.mkv running without SMPlayer and playback is
> > > perfect. So SMPlayer does not work well with mplayer-vaapi on my system.
> > > I guess I ned to ditch SMPlayer if I want to use mplayer-vaapi?
> > 
> > Since there is no -vc option none of these use hardware decoding.
> > If you didn't use e.g. -vc ffh264vdpau when you tested the VDPAU
> > wrapper you weren't using hardware decoding there either, so it's
> > no surprise that it only makes things slower.
> 
> Well, when he runs mplayer from comandline there is a default config
> somewhere which probably have vo.vdpau/vo.vaapi sections with right codecs,
> but smplayer explicitely tells mplayer to ignore any configs, hence jerky
> playback in smplayer
> 
Your assumption seems to be correct. There a default /etc/mplayer/config
file that comes with the vaapi package that (among other things) says:

# since this is a VA-API specific build, default to it.
vo=vaapi
va=vaapi

Also, mplayer shows near 0 CPU usage when playing from command line
while I have approximately 25% CPU use when using SMPlayer which
indicates hardware decoding in mplayer, but not through SMPlayer.

-- 
//Christian. 
Dropbox. Your files from anywhere: http://db.tt/U8MqkVR