Release Panplayer Beta 1

[Anihil8ion2199]

Good work! Thanks! Loving the way it works so far...

 

[Michoko]

Just tested the PND version, this is really great! Thanks a lot!


I have a question: is it possible to force aspect ratio? I tried the W and E keys to adjust pan scan, but I generally obtain garbage on screen (tested on 2 videos with differents aspect ratios, but I always get corrupt display). Is mplayer capable of switching between various forced aspect ratios?

 

[peelie]

certainly better than stock player, well done!


hopefully flv files can be sorted asap!

 

[peelie]

certainly better than stock player, well done!


hopefully flv files can be sorted asap!

flv is fixed already, works fiiiine

yeah been variable for me some flv files work okay, others video speeded up and/or no image but sound

 

[JDGBOLT]

Just tested the PND version, this is really great! Thanks a lot!


I have a question: is it possible to force aspect ratio? I tried the W and E keys to adjust pan scan, but I generally obtain garbage on screen (tested on 2 videos with differents aspect ratios, but I always get corrupt display). Is mplayer capable of switching between various forced aspect ratios?

Yep, it is possible. You have to add a line to mpinput.conf that is in the appdata directory that would look something like this:


a switch_ratio 1.6


This for example would switch the aspect ratio to being 16:10 by pressing the a key, 4:3 would be say 1.33333333, etc...


JDGBOLT

 

[JDGBOLT]

certainly better than stock player, well done!


hopefully flv files can be sorted asap!

flv is fixed already, works fiiiine

yeah been variable for me some flv files work okay, others video speeded up and/or no image but sound

Do you know what the container/codecs of those files were? Were some of them h264, or flv, or whatever? You can find that info by checking the /tmp/pndrun_panplayer.out after you run the video. And, if possible, grab the binary version of panplayer and try it out, say passing -demuxer mov if they are mp4 files, this might also be why mov files play oddly, unfortunately don't have any mov files that trigger any of those sorts of bugs, so if someone could point me to examples of videos that don't play correctly, it would really help.


JDGBOLT

 

[peelie]

certainly better than stock player, well done!


hopefully flv files can be sorted asap!

flv is fixed already, works fiiiine

yeah been variable for me some flv files work okay, others video speeded up and/or no image but sound

Do you know what the container/codecs of those files were? Were some of them h264, or flv, or whatever? You can find that info by checking the /tmp/pndrun_panplayer.out after you run the video. And, if possible, grab the binary version of panplayer and try it out, say passing -demuxer mov if they are mp4 files, this might also be why mov files play oddly, unfortunately don't have any mov files that trigger any of those sorts of bugs, so if someone could point me to examples of videos that don't play correctly, it would really help.


JDGBOLT

the .flv file that speeds up is H264, the audio codec is AAC.


an .flv that does not run i get errors in the pndrun_panplayer.out referring to image size?

 

[Tickles]

Woo-hoo! Plays my .m4v's flawlessly! I think I love you :wub:

 

[Michoko]

Just tested the PND version, this is really great! Thanks a lot!


I have a question: is it possible to force aspect ratio? I tried the W and E keys to adjust pan scan, but I generally obtain garbage on screen (tested on 2 videos with differents aspect ratios, but I always get corrupt display). Is mplayer capable of switching between various forced aspect ratios?

Yep, it is possible. You have to add a line to mpinput.conf that is in the appdata directory that would look something like this:


a switch_ratio 1.6


This for example would switch the aspect ratio to being 16:10 by pressing the a key, 4:3 would be say 1.33333333, etc...


JDGBOLT

Works like a charm! Cheers!


Btw, if you put :


a switch_ratio 0


It is a special value which restores the ratio to the original aspect.

 

[Anihil8ion2199]

Again, really loving this player! Thank you so much! Great work!

 

[Pickle]

If anyone has suggestions for the launcher please post as I will consider any feedback to improve it.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

it'd be be awesome to have on screen buttons/boxes like shuffle, fullscreen, aspect, cropping etc, so that you could enable before playing your files or playlist


i prefer command line the most because i can set my specific parameters


something like:


screen: windowed/fullscreen


aspect: wide, letterbox, pandora native


shuffle: yes,no


etc


also option to play x extension like *.flv or *.wmv or selected files

Yup very good idea

 

[Poem58]

So i guess now with the addition of this software along with the others that it's safe to say just about any encoded Divx, Xvid or Mp4 video should be completely playable? I'm not going to be using 720P video's but I'm about to get ready to test out what way I want to encode for the Pandora. Is there anything I should avoid encoding with settings wise? I usually encode things in a manner that saves the most amount of space while allowing for good playback. So now the H.264 may become more attractive than Divx to me (although Divx would remain compatible on my DVD player and other devices)


Should I assume now since most of my encodings won't be of either a really high resolution or bandwidth all will be OK no matter which format I choose? Or is there something I need to watch out for?

 

[Michoko]

I had the opportunity to test this player further, and I had some improvements suggestions.


- it seems the player is not tearing-free after all, and the tearing is particularly obvious on animes, where lines are more clearly defined. Do you think that vsync (or at least double buffering) could be implemented?


- on longer movies, the Pandora screen saver is still active and is triggered on a regular basis, and I have to move the nubs for example to make the video appear again. Is it possible to disable the screensaver temporarily when mplayer is running?


- another cool feature, even if I'm not sure it's technically possible: when video is streaming from the SD card, the card access LED is continuously blinking, which is a bit distracting. I have to put my thumb over the LED, so I can focus on the picture. I had the same issue with my PSP. I was wondering if there was some hardware register trick which would allow to disable card access LED activity while playing the video.


Anyway thank you for this great player, which is the best video solution right now on the Pandora IMHO!

 

[JDGBOLT]

I had the opportunity to test this player further, and I had some improvements suggestions.


- it seems the player is not tearing-free after all, and the tearing is particularly obvious on animes, where lines are more clearly defined. Do you think that vsync (or at least double buffering) could be implemented?


- on longer movies, the Pandora screen saver is still active and is triggered on a regular basis, and I have to move the nubs for example to make the video appear again. Is it possible to disable the screensaver temporarily when mplayer is running?


- another cool feature, even if I'm not sure it's technically possible: when video is streaming from the SD card, the card access LED is continuously blinking, which is a bit distracting. I have to put my thumb over the LED, so I can focus on the picture. I had the same issue with my PSP. I was wondering if there was some hardware register trick which would allow to disable card access LED activity while playing the video.


Anyway thank you for this great player, which is the best video solution right now on the Pandora IMHO!

Yep, should certainly be possible to disable the screensaver, mplayer even has an option for it, it's just not enabled in mpconfig.conf at the moment, forgot about that setting. Blinking LED's, not too sure, might be possible in the script, only problem being that it'll likely need root access to actually change the parameters in I am guessing the /sys filesystem. Unfortunately the vsync and double buffering commands are on, not too sure how to actually get it to use it, or if it is using it. Might have something to do with the optimizations that I did to make sure video plays smoothly on the pandora, namely the lavdopts line, you can try commenting that out in the appdata folder and seeing if that fixes it. I also tested it primarily with anime, and it definitely is noticeable, I just focused my efforts on getting the thing working and without really noticeable stuttering. And sorry I haven't really been active for the past few days, had to take a break, as doing this was pretty much like 4 full 12-16 hour days to get everything working correctly, testing, etc...


JDGBOLT

 

[JDGBOLT]

So i guess now with the addition of this software along with the others that it's safe to say just about any encoded Divx, Xvid or Mp4 video should be completely playable? I'm not going to be using 720P video's but I'm about to get ready to test out what way I want to encode for the Pandora. Is there anything I should avoid encoding with settings wise? I usually encode things in a manner that saves the most amount of space while allowing for good playback. So now the H.264 may become more attractive than Divx to me (although Divx would remain compatible on my DVD player and other devices)


Should I assume now since most of my encodings won't be of either a really high resolution or bandwidth all will be OK no matter which format I choose? Or is there something I need to watch out for?

It's recommended to use something like xvid or theora to encode with, it might take more space, but, it will play back much smoother and need much less resources to play. x/h264 does have nice savings with regards to quality, but if you want a good experience with playback, it's best to use xvid, mostly all the files that I threw at it played back fine that were encoded with this. Just my personal recommendation, anyway.


JDGBOLT

 

[JDGBOLT]

it'd be be awesome to have on screen buttons/boxes like shuffle, fullscreen, aspect, cropping etc, so that you could enable before playing your files or playlist


i prefer command line the most because i can set my specific parameters


something like:


screen: windowed/fullscreen


aspect: wide, letterbox, pandora native


shuffle: yes,no


etc


also option to play x extension like *.flv or *.wmv or selected files

Yeah, I mentioned the playlist/multiple files thing to pickle, unfortunately he wanted to make picklelauncher mostly focused on being an application launcher, not a media browser. And it is possible to do arguments thrown to the script, only reason it isn't currently enabled was because there had been some problems with doing it stably, the latest builds of picklelauncher mostly fix that, unfortunately how it works is it's per file, so you'll have to do it for each file, there isn't a way to say do a global option. At least that I could find, anyway, though I did mention it to pickle. And you can already modify a lot of settings by editing the mpconfig.conf file, there aren't really too many options that are actually passed to mplayer by the script. Mostly it's just things like fullscreen if you are using omapfb, or which video output to use, that kind of thing. Though I guess I could add some options for aspect and the like for aspect ratio or fullscreen or whatever. Though I find it easier to add something to change the aspect ratio to the mpinput.conf file, so I can just have a key that I press to select the right option, but that's just me.


JDGBOLT

 

[Poem58]

So i guess now with the addition of this software along with the others that it's safe to say just about any encoded Divx, Xvid or Mp4 video should be completely playable? I'm not going to be using 720P video's but I'm about to get ready to test out what way I want to encode for the Pandora. Is there anything I should avoid encoding with settings wise? I usually encode things in a manner that saves the most amount of space while allowing for good playback. So now the H.264 may become more attractive than Divx to me (although Divx would remain compatible on my DVD player and other devices)


Should I assume now since most of my encodings won't be of either a really high resolution or bandwidth all will be OK no matter which format I choose? Or is there something I need to watch out for?

It's recommended to use something like xvid or theora to encode with, it might take more space, but, it will play back much smoother and need much less resources to play. x/h264 does have nice savings with regards to quality, but if you want a good experience with playback, it's best to use xvid, mostly all the files that I threw at it played back fine that were encoded with this. Just my personal recommendation, anyway.


JDGBOLT

Thanks, foe personal encoding I do prefer Divx/Xvid, However I do have some small H.264's (Mainly Ipod encodes from long ago when I actually owned one) you are saying these will still have issues with playback? (most are 320x240 and I have one that is about 600x400) and they usually never exceed around 768Kbps if that helps.

 

[JDGBOLT]

So i guess now with the addition of this software along with the others that it's safe to say just about any encoded Divx, Xvid or Mp4 video should be completely playable? I'm not going to be using 720P video's but I'm about to get ready to test out what way I want to encode for the Pandora. Is there anything I should avoid encoding with settings wise? I usually encode things in a manner that saves the most amount of space while allowing for good playback. So now the H.264 may become more attractive than Divx to me (although Divx would remain compatible on my DVD player and other devices)


Should I assume now since most of my encodings won't be of either a really high resolution or bandwidth all will be OK no matter which format I choose? Or is there something I need to watch out for?

It's recommended to use something like xvid or theora to encode with, it might take more space, but, it will play back much smoother and need much less resources to play. x/h264 does have nice savings with regards to quality, but if you want a good experience with playback, it's best to use xvid, mostly all the files that I threw at it played back fine that were encoded with this. Just my personal recommendation, anyway.


JDGBOLT

Thanks, foe personal encoding I do prefer Divx/Xvid, However I do have some small H.264's (Mainly Ipod encodes from long ago when I actually owned one) you are saying these will still have issues with playback? (most are 320x240 and I have one that is about 600x400) and they usually never exceed around 768Kbps if that helps.

Nah, they should work mostly fine, a few hiccups here and there, for the best experience I recommend xvid. SD h264 files should play just fine, though you may need to overclock a bit to get it to be perfectly smooth. Just if you are actually ripping stuff or whatever, I recommend xvid as it'll just have a better experience with it overall, but h264 will work.


JDGBOLT

 

[Michoko]

Yep, should certainly be possible to disable the screensaver, mplayer even has an option for it, it's just not enabled in mpconfig.conf at the moment, forgot about that setting. Blinking LED's, not too sure, might be possible in the script, only problem being that it'll likely need root access to actually change the parameters in I am guessing the /sys filesystem. Unfortunately the vsync and double buffering commands are on, not too sure how to actually get it to use it, or if it is using it. Might have something to do with the optimizations that I did to make sure video plays smoothly on the pandora, namely the lavdopts line, you can try commenting that out in the appdata folder and seeing if that fixes it. I also tested it primarily with anime, and it definitely is noticeable, I just focused my efforts on getting the thing working and without really noticeable stuttering. And sorry I haven't really been active for the past few days, had to take a break, as doing this was pretty much like 4 full 12-16 hour days to get everything working correctly, testing, etc...


JDGBOLT

I commented the lavdopts line, but it had no visible effect. I also tried to change the values of vsync and double buffer, just in case, but no change either. I guess this is something a bit more tricky.


Anyway, thank you for your replies, and for your hard work on this great project!