One XL IQ Routes video player performace

[ttluzer]

First of all, amazing job everyone, this piece of software has a great potential to become the best free media player for TomTom navigation HW! Now back to my bug report
I have tried 2 players now, yours and the one from Mobilnova. I can play videos up to 300kbps xvid + 64kbps mp3 with mobilnova player. However, when I try to play this video with tomplayer, it is too jerky as if it was too much for it. Removing audio helps a lot, but it is not an option, obviously. Lowering video bitrate and/or framerate helps too (it is still jerky) but this is not an option either as the video is too ugly. I suspect the video decoder is to blame to be too slow (unoptimized), or is there something I can do about it? Thanks for any suggestions.

[wolfgar]

Hi,

Finding the right parameters for a given model is not always so easy. (especially on XL which have big screens and low CPUs)
Which encoder do you use ?
Be aware that mobilnova uses the same player as tomplayer (the free and excellent mplayer) so the video decoder is the same (maybe we do not rely on the same version it's true) and the root cause of this difference is elsewhere...
How do you have installed tomplayer ? as a standalone app on integrated in the navcore ?
Please try it as a stand alone app.

(To improve the situation , you may also try to reduce the FPS )

Regards,

[ttluzer]

I use avidemux on linux to recode videos for tomtom. I experimented with various codecs and parameters, here is what is best so far for my XL: MPEG-4 (ASP) xvid4, 10 fps, 480x272, 300 kbps, 64kbps ABR mono mp3. Such video plays well in Mobilnova but fails to play correctly in tomplayer, video drops to 1fps, audio is OK. When I remove audio stream, video plays well.
I installed tomplayer simply by copying distribution folder to tomtom internal flash, I did not modify any system files and I run it from the main menu.
Also, reducing FPS to 8 helps a bit, but it is too much (10 is awful already
Thanks for you help.

[wolfgar]

Ok, i was not aware that you were already at 10 fps ! ;=)

This is really an interesting problem. i really would like to have the same device to be able to investigate why the video is so jerky while it is not with the other player (the bad and evil commercial one ).
As i explained, basically, the video decoder is the same...

Can you send to me the encoded video so that i check if there is a weird CPU load even on my TT go device ? I can open an FTP access if it is too big for email ...

[ttluzer]

Today I tried mplayer binary downloaded from tomtomheaven.com. With it, the video plays almost OK, just fps drops to some 5fps. There are maybe some slower decoding/demuxing libraries used, maybe configuration or compilation parameters are to blame? I also noticed (with other video) that tomplayer and tomtomheaven's player produce visual artefacts when decoding xvid ... and that evil commercial player works just fine - except that it quits after 2 minutes Thanks for any help.

[wolfgar]

Just for the story about mplayer on ttheaven : It was our first mplayer version ! patrick (nulpointer) built it and began to work on gmplayer (the name of tomplayer before we decide to choose a more adequate one. By the way i think that if you take an old release from tomplayer you will get the exact same binary for mplayer...)

Anyway this information is interesting... How did you test it ? did you just replace the mplayer binary and used Tomplayer to launch ?

Anyway i think i am going to build an uptodate mplayer so that you can give it a try , ok ?


Regards,

Stéphan

[ttluzer]

Exactly, I just overwrote mplayer and mplayer.conf and launched it from tomplayer GUI as usual (it did not show the video thumbnail, though, but was able to play it). I did it this way because the mplayer GUI from tomtomheaven did not work at all. If you could build an updated mplayer I will surely test it, thanks for your interest and cooperation, I very much appreciate it.

[wolfgar]

Hi

I have just rebuilt a very uptodate mplayer (it is the snapshot from yesterday ion fact : MPlayer SVN-r30895-snapshot-3.3.4 !).
It has been quite challenging (especially because the tomtom gcc is not able to build a recent libavcodec) but i have done it .

I do not expect a real performance improvement (i have checked on my own device : quality seems to have a little improved but the load appears to be the same)


I am working on a new very light build (i am going to keep only the very needed options ) to get a teny binary and see if that helps for perfs on your device...

Regards

You can download my new (big) mplayer build here : http://www.tomplayer.net/mplayer.zip

[ttluzer]

Hi there,

thanks for the new build. I have just tried it and here are my observations: 1. Standard tomplayer 0.220 installation with the new binary: very bad performance (no improvement?) 2. I kept the new binary and started to experiment with the config file and found out that if I remove the "demuxer=lavf" parameter the performance dramatically improves. Other parameters do not seem to have a noticeable performance impact. It is still slower than mobilnova though (2 vs 10 fps). I am looking forward to a new light build. Also if you have other ideas about tweaking the config, please let me know. Also, the decoder seems to be buggy or misconfigured, the other video that I have still shows visual artefacts.

[wolfgar]

Hi,

About your 2 points :

1.
When you say "very bad perf" : is it worse than with the previous version or the same ?
As i said in my previous post : i have not observed any significant load change with this new version but it was not worse.

2.
Many thanks for the demuxer=lavf tips ! you are right i may help ...

For the quality : do you speak about the artefacts on the video you sent to me ? because even on my desktop mplayer , this video has very bad artefacts on the background (especially at the begining).
I dont understand what is buggy : if you have a video that is displayed correctly on a desktop mplayer and which is obviously not correclty played on my tomtom mplayer build, then i would be glad to investigate but i have not seen such a thing for now...

Still, about quality and the decoder with this build : we have the most uptodate libavcodec library : i can hardly see how to improve, at least at the decoding level (of course postprocessing could help... ).

I have other questions :
How do you measure the effective FPS in your tests ??
Which version of mobilnova do you use ? (i repeat myself : they use mplayer , a quite old version if i remember correctly)

I was also wondering if it may be a problem of memory pressure : you could do a test to launch directly mplayer from a script without tomplayer (of course, then the menu and the skin will not be available but obviously we would free some memory for mplayer itself) to check if it helps regarding performances, besides it would enable to play with the launch options (because there are some options that are always passed as parameters when i launch mplayer from tomplayer...)
basically you just have to keep the begining of the tomplayergui.sh script (until line 77 where you have the comment : # Tomplayer / start_engine loop ) then you drop the rest of the file and replace by a command like :
./mplayer -quiet -include ./conf/mplayer.conf /mnt/movinand/video/myvideo.avi

At last i have a smaller build (it is not so small but it is the smallest that can be built from my current snapshot) : you can get it at http://www.tomplayer.net/mplayer2.zip (here again i have not been able to see a load improvement...)

I hope we will be able to find how to get the best from your device and to improve tomplayer...

Regards

Edit : another idea : you can try to encode with mono audio (any with the internal speaker it is not a problem) to see if that helps...

[ttluzer]

Good news first: I have almost perfrect player now, thanks for your help! The thing that helped a lot this time was your suggestion to encode sound in mono. Well, I was always using "mono audio" setting in avidemux but just today I checked the result I have learned that the setting is silently ignored by avidemux So I quickly recoded audio to mono in virtualdub and fps increased almost twofold! I do not have exact numbers though (how can I get them? can mplayer render fps while playing?)

To answer your questions:
1) "very bad perf" - yes the v2 binary is about twice as slow as the original binary (using default config). With the patched config the new binary is a lot faster even compared to the original binary ... and the original binary does not work with the patched config, unfortunately anyway, using original binary is out of question as it does NOT play xvid correctly (at least videos I have)

2) artefacts appear in an other video I have (not the one I sent you) ... maybe the video is broken, if I encounter it in yet another video, I will let you know

3) As I wrote before, I do not measure FPS, just do a best guess by observation

4) I use mobilnova 4.3.3.2

5) Thanks for the smaller build ... the best so far ... it does not help playback performance but it starts up quite fast (maybe because it does not render thumbnails?)

I will let you know once I test mplayer without tomplayer if it helps anything, thanks for your help

edit - "does NOT play xvid correctly"

[wolfgar]

Many thanks for your feedback,

It really helps me to improve tomplayer and to be aware of issues that i cannot see on my onwn tomtom device...
For the FPS, i am not aware of an option that would display it on mplayer while paying, that is why i was asking in fact

If you perform the tests to launch mplayer alone, keep me informed, i would be interested by the results...

About the thumbnails, even with a mplayer which is able to display them, you can disallow them as i have recently explained in the last posts of this thread : viewtopic.php?f=15&t=225

regards