[PROBLEM - Frame Drops] Frames Dropping in a Quad Core 2.66

[45678912]

Hello,

I'm having a lot of frames dropping in my Quad Core 2.66 Ghz with Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT 512 VRAM DDR2 667 MHZ with 4GB RAM DDR2 800 MHZ... This only happens in H264 videos that are 1080p...

MEDIA DETAILS:

VIDEO

CODEC: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (PART 10) (AVC1)
RESOLUTION: 1920X1080
FPS: 23.976215

AUDIO

CODEC: DTS AUDIO (DTS)
CANAIS: 3F2R/LRE
FREQUENCY: 48000HZ
BITS/SEC: 1536 KB/S

FILE SIZE: 8GB

DETAILS OF SMPLAYER CONFIGURATION:

Demuxer: lavfpref

Selected Codec (VIDEO): ffh264

Selected Codec (AUDIO): ffdca

OUTPUT DRIVER: VDPAU (sometimes I also use XV)

MARKED OPTIONS IN GENERAL --> VIDEO TAB: DISABLE VIDEO FILTERS WHEN USING VDPAU; DOUBLE BUFFERING; DRAW VIDEO USING SLICES; DISABLE SCREENSAVER

MARKED OPTIONS IN PERFORMANCE: ALLOW FRAME DROP; THREADS FOR DECODING (MPEG-1/2 AND H264 ONLY) = 8; LOOP FILTER = ENABLED; FAST AUDIO TRACK SWITCHING = AUTO; CACHE FOR LOCAL FILES = 0 KB; CACHE FOR STREAMS = 1000 KB; CACHE FOR DVD'S = 0 KB; CACHE FOR AUDIO CD'S = 1000 KB; CACHE FOR VCD'S = 1000 KB; CACHE FOR TV = 3000 KB

PS: USING MOST UP-TO-DATE NVIDIA DRIVERS FOR GEFORCE 9600 GT DOWNLOADED FROM NVIDIA.COM...

Thanks for your help,

André M.

[Surkow]

You shouldn't have dropped frames when you are using VDPAU. On your computer xv should be used in combination with multithreaded mplayer (to make use of those 4 cores).

[MacTheKnife]

Are you sure it's frame dropping or could it be stuttering due to a mismatch between the "supposedly" 24p frame rate that your video card is outputting and the frame rates your monitor will actually sync to?

BTW, if you really think it's frame-dropping, I see you have the loop filter enabled, so one thing you could try is disabling the loop filter for HD videos.

[45678912]

Hello MacTheKnife and Surkow,

What I'm having here is an incompatibility issue with MPlayer (backend) and Vuze or JDownloader (I don't know exactly which one is the cause, I'll later post my test results) that I could only detect now (I tested the video after rebooting my LINUX and it worked pretty well with both GNOME MPLAYER and SMPLAYER)... This have also happened in other videos that I have in H264 format (I don't have any video in other CODEC format, so I could not test the other CODEC playback issues related to this problem)...

PROBLEM:

When opened Vuze or JDownloader (I don't know exactly which one is the cause, I'll later post my test results), the video starts to stutter/frame drop (or anything similar - I don't know exactly how can I detail the issue precisely to you) in some parts and this happens in a specific range/interval of time (less than 1 minute of continuous play of the video)...
Even when I close both programs, the problem persists... I can only solve it if I restart my LINUX (I'll test if restarting Xorg will make this work well again)...

PS: I have created a bug report in LAUNCHPAD about this ... Also, this don't happen in VLC...

PS²: I know this could sound strange because these programs (JDOWNLOADER AND VUZE) are related to NETWORK and not VIDEO, but I could see very clearly the difference in the video playback (with both OUTPUT formats VDPAU and XV) after I rebooted the system and did not opened these programs... Anyway, If I discover something new (any workaround or specific procedure that is causing the issue), I'll send the results back to you...

Thanks for your help,

André M.

[45678912]

Hello again,

Completing the other comment I made, my monitor can sync 60 HZ and is model W2353V of LG and I'm using NVIDIA 260.19.44 original proprietary driver downloaded from NVIDIA.COM with a NVIDIA GEFORCE 9600GT with DirectRendering Enabled and KDE 4.5.1 with KUBUNTU 10.10 installed as well as UBUNTU 10.10...

Thanks for your help,

André M.

[MacTheKnife]

[45678912]

Hello MacTheKnife,

I'll try your solution to see if that solves the problem and I'll also do some other tests to see what exactly is happening in my system and how can we solve this problem...

PS: What I can say until now is that restarting Xorg (KDM or GDM service) via SUDO SERVICE KDM RESTART do not solve the problem at all...

Thanks for your help,

André M.

[45678912]

Hello Again,

(BAD NEWS) TEST RESULTS:
The problem seems to be increased by either VUZE or JDOWNLOADER, but it does exist even when these programs are not running or were not executed in the system...

(GOOD NEWS) SOLUTION (until now, the problem seems to have disappeard):
Thanks to both MacTheKnife and Surkow, I could have solved the issue with the configurations above:
- In GENERAL --> VIDEO TAB set the video output to VDPAU (if you don't have an NVIDIA GRAPHIC CARD you should use XV instead); DO NOT ENABLE POST PROCESSING WITH VDPAU (It makes the problem worse); Also, I tried DIRECT RENDERING and it didn't worked as I wanted (make the quality, speed and decompression of the video better)
- Go to PERFORMANCE and set threads for decoding to the number of cores that your processor has (in my case, my processor is a Quad core, but I set 8 threads to be used. So the program should use 2 threads per core in my case, making the core usage raise, but also making the decoding more efficient by using more resources of the machine); Go to CACHE TAB and set CACHE for the type of file your trying to open (in my case, is a local file) to a high kilobyte number (I've put 4 MB, but I saw some persons putting 8 MB as well)
- Go to ADVANCED --> OPTIONS FOR MPLAYER and set "-autosync 30" (without quotation marks) as OPTIONS to be used by MPLAYER
- APPLY ALL THE CHANGES AND CLICK OK...
- RESTART YOUR SMPLAYER AND HAVE FUN

You might be asking yourself WHAT DOES THIS SPECIAL CONFIGURATIONS DO TO MPLAYER FUNCTIONALITIES?
- What I could search about them is that the "-autosync 30" option makes MPLAYER THINK that your video has 30 FPS (this is useful because sometimes MPLAYER can't define correctly the right FPS rate to the movie your running, and this can cause stuttering, tearing, vertical/horizontal bars on the video and/or other problems)
- Also, like VDPAU uses NVIDIA GPU to render and decode some parts of the video (the rest is done in the CPU), it distributes the computer resources more homogeneously, making it use the remaining resources to provide a better quality and speed to your video...
- Post processing seems to not raise so much the video quality and it DOES SLOWDOWN the video decompression, speed and it also makes the use of CPU AND GPU higher without so much changes to the quality of the video (IMHO, this option should not be used; it don't worth the shot)
- CACHE does a temporary save of a small part of the video (the size specified by you will be saved) in the RAM memory or even CPU cache (I don't know exactly what temporary memory does it use)...Anyway, it provides a better access to the video/audio information contained in the movie file (.AVI ; MKV; and others) because the RAM or CPU cache access are very very very fast (more than 3x faster depending on the type of memory you have - DDR2, DDR3 and other types) when compared to the HDD speed of file access (about 3 Gbps in SATA HDD's)

PS: These options seems to work not only for me, but for other people too and it also appears to made 1080p FULL HD videos work on Dual Core processors fairly well... I don't know if it does the same for a Mono/Single Core processor (like Celeron D or others)...

PS²: If you are using a SINGLE CORE processor, maybe CoreAVC (commercial codec) would be the best recommendation for you because it does provides 1080p video playback with normal speed in SINGLE CORE 2.0 ghz fairly well... To do so, you'll need to compile MPLAYER with CoreAVC (I don't have any idea of how to do this, I only know that it must be done to MPLAYER use COREAVC) and select SMPLAYER TO USE IT (go to PERFORMANCE and mark USE COREAVC IF NO OTHER CODEC SPECIFIED)...

PS³: If I wrote something wrong, please correct me

Thanks for Surkow and MacTheKnife help and I hope I could help someone,

André M.

[Surkow]

@45678912, your post is very informative.

Ubuntu users wanting to use CoreAVC (or simply want to use the latest precompiled multithreaded mplayer version) can use repository.