SMplayer 14 (latest)/SMTube on Pentium III - not usable

[sindi]

I added a 2005 uclibc mplayer and now cannot type anything in a urxvt so I cannot see error messages when I try to start smtube. ??? Mplayer plays ogg and mp3 test files. So does vlc. I tried setting mplayer as the defaultmediaplayer. smtube still does not work. The debian version of smtube was supposed to be i386.

Any ideas?

[sindi]

smplayer .6994 also works on the 866MHz DELL C400, at 360p (possibly more), where opera uses 96% of cpu and youtube/browser is hopeless.

The Precise Ubuntu smtube 15.5 segfaults in Tahr Puppy Linux. vlc does not.

[marcelo-ar]

[sindi]

Changing resolution from within smplayer also appears to have no effect. I found it set at 720p and varied it from 240 to 1080 and it looked the same.
I tested on the DELL Inspiron 8100 1GHz. F, ESC, and space bar do work.

On the C400 (866MHz) there are numerous problems. Ctl-C toggles captions but F or ESC does not toggle fullscreen. It is always fullscreen (too blurry).
I have not tried other controls yet such as M for mute.

The main problem is that sometimes the video becomes very slow (it may keep getting slower) and the sound is out of sync and gets way ahead of the video, then goes into an endless loop, repeating about 1-2 sec of sound over and over and over. I cannot pause the video and have to terminate it with the task manager. I tried adding -framedrop to the mplayer settings in smplayer.
This computer acts much much slower than the other even without smplayer. Opera uses 96% of RAM (at 1024x768). I deleted AVG to reduce CPU usage.
This also makes it respond VERY slowly to any attempt to control play (space bar or click on pause). It would help to lower resolution but I have no idea what resolution it is even at since I cannot control resolution on either P3.

I will try 7014 with the updated libraries. I did not see mention of that on the sourceforge download page. Presumably only XP needs them.

[marcelo-ar]

[sindi]

Adding the 'light' win32 openssl to Smplayer version 7017 fixed things.
I hope someone adds that information to the sourceforge download pages.

I still cannot change resolution (on the 8100). 1080p and 360p look the same. When I download a 360p youtube video with youtube-dl (linux) and play it with mplayer (in X or fbdev) mplayer says my computer is too slow but it plays fine anyway on the DELL 8100 1GHz, with 50% cpu usage. 480p might work.

I would like to try 240p on the 866MHz C400 to maybe eliminate the very slow video, sound going out of synch, and looping, and maybe that would fix the non-working controls as well, to allow us to view at less than full screen and to stop, mute, etc. Any more ideas? I cannot easily put linux on that computer (for youtube-dl) - it only boots from hard drive so the drive would need to be set up in another computer.

The 8100, the Toshiba, and also an 8200 (which is 2GHz but tests out much slower than the 8100) all have stopped amplifying their sound chips (the 8100 also does not output sound to speakers any more) so I would really like to get the C400 working right. Thanks for all the help..

[marcelo-ar]

[sindi]

The windows youtube-dl site said the exe (5.7MB, 20Kbps download) required python (17MB, a much shorter download) and if I typed youtube-dl at a command prompt I got an error message about it not being a Win32 executable. The link to the executable with python incorporated was broken.

I continued using the .6994 smplayer, set resolution to 240p in smplayer on the C400 in preferences, network. This time it worked and I got highly pixilated video but sound and video were synchronized. I also set mplayer to -framedrop. I still can only watch fullscreen (F only toggles the controls at screen bottom).

dxdiag says there is no hardware buffering only software buffering of sound. Maybe that caused the endless loop. UDMA 5 for the IDE drive. I do not know why Opera uses 95% of cpu. I installed two Youtube downloader extensions and did not see any way to access them. Both were far smaller than youtube-dl even without python added.

I found instructions for using youtube-dl without python but the link was broken. I also read that the executable should be renamed ending in .py instead of .exe but youtube-dl.py --help just got me an error message about non-ASCII characters. Not important since I can set smplayer to be usable, though it would be nice to have a smaller less fuzzy image than full screen.

I forgot to check cpu usage while playing a youtube video. The pixillation was much worse in areas of movement but everything stayed perfectly synchronized and there were no freezes.

Thanks for all the help.

I have not yet tried watching upside down, sideways, or backwards.

[sindi]

I managed to install Puppy Linux without removing the hard drive (there is no floppy or CD drive and it will not boot from USB drives) by downloading 100MB Windows Installer (Wary Puppy 5.1.1 from about 2012). It unpacked itself into a partition on the NTFS drive and set up grldr (grub) to load Puppy, leaving Windows ntldr in command and the default OS.

I was planning to shrink the NTFS partition but Wary runs itself with the partition mounted and you cannot shrink a mounted partition.

I now have linux tools to test with:

DELL C400 866MHz hdparm - UDMA 5, ATA-5
DELL 8100 1GHs has ATA-7 drive.
hdparm -t - the 18GB drive is 1/9 the speed of the 75GB in the 8100.

Two CPU benchmarking tools:
Blowfish - C400 314, 8100 35 (which is about 80% of a 1.5GHz machine)
Cryptohash - C400 3.83, 8100 35

The C400 tests out at 60% of the speed of a 280MHz, or 180MHz equivalent.
I am lucky it plays videos at 240p even blurry and pixelated. I have a 233Mhz Thinkpad that I think did better. With 96MB RAM. This has 512MB.

The 1GHc Pentium III CPU in the 8300 is 9X as fast as the 864MHz CPU in C400.
The C400 is also Pentium III, and both are Xeon/Celeron with 512K cache.

SO I searched on DELL C400 slow. Someone with a 1.33GHz C400 1GB RAM tested CPU speed (at Performance Max) and it was 198MHz. They said others had the same problem. It cannot be software since I tried two OSes.

Mplayer in linux might do slightly better, in framebuffer mode without X,
which is currently using 28% of the memory doing nothing.

I have a 300MHz Toshiba Portege with 64MB RAM.....

[sindi]

Youtube-dl downloads 3gp (240p - plays at 320x180p), or flv (240p - plays at 426x240) or mp4 (360p). Mplayer says it is too slow to play the 360p and it is jerky and very out of sync. The flv is twice the size of the 3gp and they both look fine. The latter is about the size of a cell phone but the sound is louder. The flv full-screen is fuzzy but NOT pixelated, i. e., it looks a lot better in linux with mplayer than in Windows with smtube/smplayer.

I tried to play with framebuffer (fbdev) and got only sound. No looping.

CPU usage for the MP4 was 76% so maybe it is the graphic chip that cannot keep up. If I played during the youtube download, youtube-dl used 24% of CPU but it is not a problem for flv. I started the download then started mplayer. No need for -framedrop.

top shows mplayer using 28%-35% of cpu and 8% of memory, X 29% of memory.

Linux also boots faster, despite the slow hard drive and the NTFS partition (which requires an additional driver).