SMPlayer with Omxplayer

[Dcduo]

Hello everyone,

I am inexperienced yet enjoying playing around with my Raspberry PI, which I am using as my desktop computer at the moment. My favourite way to play youtube videos (and what sounds like the simplest) is SMTube, which is working great.

I noticed tonight that the player seems to use "MPlayer" to play the videos. Although it works well, I notice slowdown sometimes when there is lots of movement on screen. I wanted to try Omxplayer, which I heard might be better as it supports gpu acceleration (I'm not sure if MPlayer does also but I am curious to test the difference).

I am having a little bit of trouble, though. When I go into the settings > players > and put "omxplayerGUI" to the top it seems to still use MPlayer (which I have as second on the list). I have tried playing around, ticking boxes and changing parameters and the like that I found on the net (making note of the defaults ofc) but I haven't been able to get it to work at all. I have tried also creating a plain "omxplayer" one with the executable as "omxplayer" as well as "omxplayer -o hdmi %f" or "/usr/bin/omxplayer" and another which I have now lost, but nothing seems to work. It will either do nothing or skip down to MPlayer.

I think you can tell that I don't have much of a clue what I am doing, I have a feeling I am doing something silly.

Any help or advice would be very much appreciated!

Darran

[rvm]

You have to put the full path of the binary. Be sure it exists and is executable.

[Dcduo]

I haven't been able to find anything on the net to say where this could be, but doing a bit of hoaking this morning I've found "/usr/bin/omxplayer.bin". When I add this to the "executable" it just does nothing. I also found "/usr/lib/omxplayer" and decided to give it a try for the sake of it, and it plays MPlayer. I have also tried adding "/usr/share/applications/omxplayergui.desktop" but no go.

I decided to delete MPlayer from the list of players (backed up settings) and now it tries to play on the youtube page like a browser again. I'm a little confused. Thank you for the help so far.

[Dcduo]

I've managed something now. I deleted all what I had and pressed "Add Predefined Players" then I added one called "Omxplayer" put it's executable as just "omxplayergui" with the parameter "%u". Omxplayergui does open, but only for a second then closes down again. That is some progress at least! Is there anything I am doing wrong at this stage?

[Dcduo]

Fixed! It turned out to be something simple indeed. I had allocated 32mb of ram to graphics memory. I read in another thread that omxplayer requires a good bit more, so I allocated 256mb in the split and all works perfectly with both omxplayer and omxplayergui.

1080p streaming now as smooth as butter and with very little from the cpu. GPU acceleration seems to be working indeed!


For the sake of information for anyone else who finds this thread, I have a Raspberry Pi 2 B and I am currently using this overclock (at time of writing). The substantial gpu frequency might be the cause of this performance, though I will need to test it at stock to compare, and I'm not 100% sure that it will be stable in the long run how it is currently, but it sure is working great at the moment. The ram/gpu memory split I will need to test to see what I can get away with, as Chromium tends to be very hungry for it, but you get the idea!

gpu_mem=256
arm_freq=1050
core_freq=550
sdram_freq=500
over_voltage=2
gpu_freq=500


Thank you very much again!

[QBall1977]

Dear All,

I hope this thread NEVER dies, I'm trying to follow the guide above. I used SMPlayer and the great SMTube for a while with the Experimental Linux OpenGL drivers for the Pi3, but this caused no end of issues and system instability. I've turned the drivers off and found OMXPlayerGUI great for playing youtube videos etc. Infact I'm using the latest SMTube to copy and paste the link into OMXPlayerGUI, however it would be great if I could configure SMPlayer to play them using this stable build.

I'm trying to follow the instructions above, however a lot has changed in a year. I don't suppose anyone has any advice on setting up SMPlayer with OMXPlayerGUI?

I have tried setting the Options, Preferences, General, Multimedia Engine to 'omxplayergui' and '/usr/bin/omxplayer', which seem to be ok, but not sure where to add the "%u" as mentioned above, I thought under Advanced, MPlayer/mpv, options - but am not sure whether it's meant to be in " " or not.

Anyone still using this, just as I love the functionality of SMPlayer and SMTube intergration, I just need the stability of OMXPlayerGUI.

Thanks in advance for any responses.

[QBall1977]

Figured it out, the settings weren't in SMPlayer, but SMTube.

I did not realise that you could force SMTube to choose an alternative player.

so I did, went to view-Settings-Players, created OMXPlayer as suggested above.

I also added the following switches
-ytdl "%u"

Forcing to use Youtube-Dl and extract.

Then little fiddling in KWeb to configure the OMXPlayerGUI to start fullscreen, with controls hidden. Job done, just like SMPlayer worked with custom MPV and Experimental OpenGL drivers enabled!!!