video playback with compiz
Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:16 - Daniel - Other - Comments (0)
Video playback with compiz running is pretty slow and sometimes there are some nasty glitches, like not being able to go to full screen mode, black video etc. Some of this is because of how compiz handles the video. But the good news is there is a way to get good video playback with compiz running.
There is a patch for mplayer 1.0rc2 that lets mplayer use some compiz functions to draw the video. You need to have the video plugin enabled in compiz for this to work.
First we need to get the mplayer sources.
apt-get build-dep mplayerapt-get install build-essentialapt-get source mplayer
Navigate to mplayer-1.0~rc2/libvo, download the patch and apply it.
patch -p0 vo_xv.c mplayrepatch.patch
Now you should update debain/changelog to create a new version of the package and build and install the package with
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -usdpkg -i mplayer_1.0-rc2-0ubuntu17_i386.deb
I tried this with ubuntu 8.10 intrepid. If newer versions of ubuntu ship with a version of mplayer that is incompatible with the patch you have to get the mplayer1.0rc2 source code from the mplayer site.
Video playback should work now without problems. There are some other goodies apart from decent video playback speed and working full screen mode, but these two were the most important for me.
Tags: video ubuntu mplayer linux
Video containers are shit
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:51 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
This is going to be a rant, so skip it if you don't care.
Video playback is a pain in the ass. It's not just about codecs and players, but the video containers themselves are shit. I only had one container that has not caused problems yet. Everything else bugged sooner or later.
WMV regularly fails to resume video playback after pause in Media Player Classic. No idea why, but pause just doesn't work here.
MP4 caused some weird problems in mplayer, where the video length is all wrong and the audio and video go out of sync. No idea what's wrong with those shitty files, but I pretty much can't watch those files like this. And to make matters worse, mplayer is the only video player that has decent performance on Linux with Compiz running. The only way to fix these files was to remux them to MKV.
AVI files sometimes come without an index, requiring rebuilding of said index. I just don't get how a encoder can fuck up a video so much that it's unplayable on some players. And why doesn't anyone check before redistributing this files?
The only container I'm happy with is Matroska (MKV). The playback works in every player I use and I have yet to encounter shitty behaviour in any player.
Tags: mkv avi mp4 wmv video mplayer
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