Better Music And Video Support Needed

[beowulf62381]

Let me start out by saying that I can't code, so this is a request for an application or at the very least information as to why it has/could not be done.

I use mplayer as my default player on both my OS X and Ubuntu boxes because it can play just about any non DRM music or video I throw at it. I have been underwhelmed at mplayers performance in this regard on my gp2x. I understand that the win32 codecs will not run on the gp2x; however I don't fully understand why mpeg 1/2, mpeg4 audio,etc won't work. I downloaded and installed mp2x since it was compiled with A52 & faad, but it does not seem to handle the .mp4/.m4a or .mpg/.mpeg file extensions.

My other concern is audio support. How hard would it be to have a modified mplayer do double duty as both the music player and video player maybe even with support for play lists in the future?

Thanks,
Beowulf62381

 

[___]

Well, playlist support and broader audio support is just a question of time. Somebody oughta do it at some point and it's probably not that hard (depends on the media format of course). The other things you are asking for are not really within reach though. As far as I know it is not as easy to get more complicated video codecs running since they might not be open-source, too performance intensive or lack support in some other way. I am not an expert though, so maybe someone else can explain. I am sure this question has already been asked a million times on this forum so try and find another topic with a similar title. Lots of people wonder why the gp2x's mplayer is not as feature flooded as the normal one.

 

[nickspoon]

A-hem.

The video codecs that mplayer on the GP2X can play are the ones that the binary module on the hardware video decoder can handle. These are DivX and XviD (which are based on the MPEG-4 codec). All other codecs would have to be handled in software, and as such would be at a similar speed to FFPlay.

 

[Trip]

Just a thought..
Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement & supports about 10 different audio formats. Couldn't this code be used & save someone a lot of time?
It works with the iPod's ARM7 chip, but I hear that it's quite a bit different to the ARM9 in the 2x.

Like I say.. it's just a thought <_<

 

[woogal]

How hard would it be to have a modified mplayer do double duty as both the music player and video player maybe even with support for play lists in the future?

The current music player already is mplayer.

 

[Parkydr]

Everytime you mention Rockbox, God kills a GP2X

Deja vu

 

[Trip]

Everytime you mention Rockbox, God kills a GP2X

Deja vu

Ah.. missed that thread, so cheers for pointing it out.
Wasn't meaning to replace the entire 2x's OS though or to make it into a dual boot system, just to re-use the audio codec support to save people having to re-write it all & start from scratch

 

[Parkydr]

mplayer has quite a few codecs, so finding codecs (open ones, anyway) isn't much of a problem, but as Nickspoon said, they'd have to be handled in software so the performance would be crap.

I've built mplayer for sparc linux. There are quite a few codecs that work fine if you like watching videos at a couple of frames per second.

 

[beowulf62381]

Ok thank you all for the input. If I'm understanding this correctly all other video codecs would have to be supported in software, which would render them to slow to be of any use including mpeg1.

I'm not 100% clear on audio though, is there enough power in the gp2x to play aac audio or some lossless codecs?

Also I'm still fuzzy on containers, assuming the gp2x can decode both the audio and video codec how much more horse power is need for the container format it self say .mov vs. .avi

lastly how short of cpu is the gp2x in theory could some units be over clocked enough to handle more difficult codecs or would it still fall far short from the needed power.

p.s. I know not all clock cycles are created equal with that said, I would assume a gp2x at 200MHz would out preform a Pentium 1 (P54C) running at 200MHz with code optimized for procs respectively. What then would be an x86 equivalent to the ARM proc in the gp2x.

Thanks,
Beowulf62381

 

[Vimacs]

the modded mplayer allready plays aac.
Also most opensource codecs could profit from the hardware accerlation once its figured out.