Movie Player

[quindo]

Hello,

Reading about the pandora it almost seems too good to be true

I currently own a GP2X and am very content with it.
Its being used to play some games (atari-st emulation could be a bit better) but recently we find our selves using it more and more as a movie player.
I've transcoded a few taped episodes of a good series and my girlfriend watches these on the GP2X.
The quality is good enough on the 320x240 screen.

However....
The GP2X shows it limitations when coupled to the TV.
An episode that looks good on the 320x240 screen looks terrible on the TV.
I've tried higher bitrates and a higher resolution but never got it right.

Now (finally) my questions:
1. Will the pandora be fast enough to watch movies on the tv?
2. Will there be a movieplayer included on the pandora?

It would be even better when I could just plug it in (breakout box?) and watch movies recorded on a network server (nfs).

 

[Fishbong]

First off, it is possible to play 720x480 movies on the GP2X with fullspeed. It´s a matter of encoding them right, try twopass encoding with XviD and VirtualDub.

And second, it is very probable that we'll have a full port of mplayer soon after the Pandora is released. Given the Pandora's superior power, i think it won't be a problem playing high-bitrate videos on it.

 

[_VWV_]

So that the question arises what bitrate will be possible? 1M? 2M? Will I be able to play non converted videos (720x480)? As far as I remember, a picture-in-picture capability was mentioned. Will I be able to play 2 movies via TV-out at the same time?

 

[icurafu]

Pandora will be able to do 720P. (1280x720)

http://www.dspdesignline.com/products/197005880

 

[Yrx]

Video on the GP2X didn't like me. If I fast forwarded or paused, the sound would come unsynced.

 

[White Demon]

Will Pandora be able to play mkv files encoded with x264? More and more anime subs are being released this way.

 

[icurafu]

H264 is supported in hardware in IVA2+.

However, to get 720P video, shaders on the SGX are used. (I guess it uses more power) :unsure:

 

[_VWV_]

Hm, as far as I get, a special player is needed to enable all that hardware support, so that I wouldn't expect features like 720p and H264 to work out of the box. Am I right?

 

[sparr]

It has nothing to do with bitrate or resolution. The GP2X could easily play massively high bitrate videos, up until the storage->cpu or cpu->display bottlenecks are hit. The problem is decompression, and that is where it slows down. How large/quality of a video you can play is purely a factor of how much you compress it. Lower compression means less cpu overhead, but more storage.

 

[_VWV_]

It has nothing to do with bitrate or resolution. The GP2X could easily play massively high bitrate videos, up until the storage->cpu or cpu->display bottlenecks are hit. The problem is decompression, and that is where it slows down. How large/quality of a video you can play is purely a factor of how much you compress it. Lower compression means less cpu overhead, but more storage.

True, but if we use compression to reduce the file size we'll need a hardware (accelerated) decompression so that the cpu won't become a bottleneck to the whole system. My concern was whether there is a player capable of using all the power of 3430 (shaders? IVA2+?) for decompression. If there is one it will help to safe some space on the SD card and simplify the whole process, coz i would only have to copy a movie from a pc without the need to reconvert (reduce the quality or increase the file size) it. Sorry, if the answer is simple, I just really don't know.

 

[icurafu]

Not sure if it is built into the linux build for the OMAP3430 or even how easy it is to add support.

 

[StealthBagel]

I'd prefer to just run VLC than mplayer or some custom... thing like Dignsys hacked up for the damn gp2x firmwares. Then you have a large range of codecs, encoding options, resolutions, playback options and you can even select multiple audio streams etc.

While this is in no way a laptop PC I do like the idea of just playing video in an X11 window environment with a maximized window, or pause/minimize it to do something else albeit with a lot of memory still in use. You could never put video in a window for rational use with so little screen real estate though unless a postage stamp is watchable to you. I'd want to shut VLC before doing something intensive but I could at least then set the video task aside and do something else....

 

[_VWV_]

Not sure if it is built into the linux build for the OMAP3430 or even how easy it is to add support.

Maybe someone working on the device would comment on that?

 

[yaustar]

QUOTE
I'd prefer to just run VLC than mplayer or some custom... thing like Dignsys hacked up for the damn gp2x firmwares. Then you have a large range of codecs, encoding options, resolutions, playback options and you can even select multiple audio streams etc.

You can do all that with MPlayer. VLC is really poor for rendering softsubs where MPlayer does a much better job.

 

[Chip]

H264 is supported in hardware in IVA2+.

That is good to hear, since H.264 is slowly becoming the standard for quality digital releases. My only complaint about the original Xbox (which I use as a media center) is that it cannot reliably play back H.264 video with its 733MHz Celeron processor alone. Good to know that Pandora will have a specialized chip to crunch the codecs.

 

[StealthBagel]

QUOTE
I'd prefer to just run VLC than mplayer or some custom... thing like Dignsys hacked up for the damn gp2x firmwares. Then you have a large range of codecs, encoding options, resolutions, playback options and you can even select multiple audio streams etc.

You can do all that with MPlayer. VLC is really poor for rendering softsubs where MPlayer does a much better job.

Well, last I used Mplayer you had to add your own frontend, which frankly sucks, the interface was awful and it wouldn't play damn near anything. Installing codecs was a pain because there were no packages for them, and apparently it was illegal to use Win32 codecs in Linux, or at least that's what some elitist linux nerds told me at length on IRC.... (I hate IRC.) VLC worked out of the box for most common formats since it came with its own codecs. That's a pretty huge advantage.

 

[Exophase]

QUOTE
I'd prefer to just run VLC than mplayer or some custom... thing like Dignsys hacked up for the damn gp2x firmwares. Then you have a large range of codecs, encoding options, resolutions, playback options and you can even select multiple audio streams etc.

You can do all that with MPlayer. VLC is really poor for rendering softsubs where MPlayer does a much better job.

Well, last I used Mplayer you had to add your own frontend, which frankly sucks, the interface was awful and it wouldn't play damn near anything. Installing codecs was a pain because there were no packages for them, and apparently it was illegal to use Win32 codecs in Linux, or at least that's what some elitist linux nerds told me at length on IRC.... (I hate IRC.) VLC worked out of the box for most common formats since it came with its own codecs. That's a pretty huge advantage.

mplayer uses libavcodec, just like VLC does for the most part. libavcodec has a ton of support for codecs and that number will continue to rise, so don't act like mplayer doesn't support most (if not all) things that VLC does out of the box. For totally proprietary formats they're both in the exact some situation. I kinda get the feeling you're hating something that you haven't used in too long, something you should really be more careful about.

And yaustar is right, VLC has terrible soft sub support. It doesn't render fonts well, it doesn't position things correctly, it overlaps simultaneous text streams (making them both pretty much illegible, this is really terrible), it doesn't hide comments, and worst of all, it has crashed for me on several occasions, completely unavoidably. I don't know what subbers are doing to piss it off but it's so bad that I can pretty much expect most episodes of certain things to crash eventually, and this forced me to use Zoom Player on Windows for anything soft subbed. This is of course with the latest version (for Windows, it'd be pretty weird if this was all somehow resolved in the other builds), I constantly check to see if they've improved any one of these things. How support for this has not gotten better after all these years is a major mystery to me, and an even bigger one is how so few people seem to care or even mention these problems.

EDIT: It looks like the only video formats that VLC supports that aren't in libavcodec are VC-1 (WMV3), VP5, and VP6.

 

[fusion_power]

I never have used "Mplayer" but I often use the good old VLC. Well, as long the Player plays everything (.FLV to!!! ) I don't care, which player the Pandora will get. If you want, you could port Every Player. Or just use a existing ARM optimized media player.

And yaustar is right, VLC has terrible soft sub support. It doesn't render fonts well,....

Thats true. I like VLC because it plays just everything but external subtitles are looking very crappy. So I more use Zoom Player which have very beautiful Sub Text if you set it right.

 

[StealthBagel]

I haven't had many issues with subs in VLC that I can recall, but then again I mostly play videos in Media Player Classic. Sadly I doubt that has a Linux version.... for anything non subtitle related VLC has some serious advantages. Softsub support is a pretty lame reason to shit all over it. If a decent frontend and codec installation procedure that is comfortable to the end user and that doesn't require the user battle with it can be implemented on Pandora then fine, I'm sure that'll work well, but choice is important because the same program is never adequate for everybody.

 

[Exophase]

I haven't had many issues with subs in VLC that I can recall, but then again I mostly play videos in Media Player Classic. Sadly I doubt that has a Linux version.... for anything non subtitle related VLC has some serious advantages. Softsub support is a pretty lame reason to shit all over it. If a decent frontend and codec installation procedure that is comfortable to the end user and that doesn't require the user battle with it can be implemented on Pandora then fine, I'm sure that'll work well, but choice is important because the same program is never adequate for everybody.

No one is "shitting all over it" as you put it, I like VLC a lot. It's just when half the things you watch are soft subbed and you really can't watch them in it that's kind of a problem, don't you think? Soft subs becoming a more and more popular alternative to hard subs, and for good reason.

Let me repeat this since I don't think you want to listen, even though it has been said to you multiple times now... mplayer uses libavcodec, it supports most popular formats natively, it doesn't need codecs any more than VLC except for a few formats, only one of which is used at all (and probably not that much).

For a platform like Pandora using the default window manager based GUI VLC has would be terrible anyway, so it seems like a custom frontend is in order no matter how you look at it, doesn't it?

Also, people must bear in mind that none of these video players are going to playback h264 at a good speed, not without being optimized for ARM, much less NEON or the PowerVR SGX shaders.