Today I tested Emotion/DvPlayer and MPlayer in the playback of 720p videos the differences were sometimes very high.
I do not want to complain, but just understand the things why Emotion and also DVPlayer are very bad in playback.
Emotion and DvPlayer I bought for AmigaOs4.1 and both media players I like very much, but do not offer what is possible with the open source media player Mplayer. In addition, Emotion does not understand drag & drop from AmiDock, which is a feature I would personally like to see.
I could also only test the software renderer since 3d acceleration is missing, but similar would probably be the tests with 3d acceleration.
Is there anyone else working on DvPlayer?
Note: I don't want to badmouth this software, but would like some understanding if I buy it too.
A lot of energy when into finding best version of FFMEG to integrate into mplayer, it was during bunty, so was not 100% free, I also guess fact that mplayer is worked on by many people over years contributes to have well it work, a provided config file provided in program dir, sets lower quality to increase speed, as well.
Other things I found during development, was mplayer read small blocks sizes from disk, and drivers sucked (X1000), as drive spined up, only to spin down, so added some code to make it read larger chunks, but that only kicks in when playing from a DVD, as its lowlevel code.
I know also MPlayer as some other cache features often enabled for network playback, it can be that help, as can reduce loading CPU spikes, but not sure if does that. there are some multi treading in mplayer, it can help even out or reduce, lag.
That’s all I remember, everything else I worked on is irrelevant as your using SDL output, that part of the code I did not work on much.
The version of mplayer I wanted to work on was one lest amount of GUI, it’s not accidental. a lot good work already done, on it before I started on it. My main focus on the general code, was make it failsafe, bug free. (mostly focus was on startup and shutdown code).
Edited by LiveForIt on 2023/8/24 20:05:21
(NutsAboutAmiga)
Basilisk II for AmigaOS4 AmigaInputAnywhere Excalibur and other tools and apps.
I could also only test the software renderer since 3d acceleration is missing, but similar would probably be the tests with 3d acceleration.
Only if there is a MPlayer version which supports hardware 3D and video decoding acceleration. For example my versions of MPlayer did include optimisations for AltiVec as well as for as CPUs without AltiVec, but everything was software-only video decoding and rendering. At that time there were several other ports of MPlayer, but all of them were software video decoding and rendering only, and slower than my version. But I don't know anything about the current AmigaOS 4.x MPlayer ports. Emotion and DvPlayer do support HW acceleration, but that requires using a gfx card with support for it (Radeon HD or RX). On QEmu you either need to use such a gfx card with pass-trough, or wait until an AmigaOS 4.x QEmu virtio-gpu driver is implemented. On real hardware both Emotion and DvPlayer should be much faster than a software-rendering MPlayer.
Edited by joerg on 2023/8/24 20:09:45 Edited by joerg on 2023/8/24 20:10:49
Emotion runs faster than Mplayer simply because it can use VA-API with Radeon HD or RX cards on AOS4. If you can't use VA-API then Mplayer will be faster. If Mplayer had vo_vaapi output it would certainly work better than Emotion. Example - my old laptop on intel with 4k video eats 90% of the CPU. When using VA-API 2%.
Emotion additionally uses the old ffmpeg2 I think.
Here is a nice article about video players in ASO 4.1, but it is in Polish. You will have to translate it into your language.
Here is a nice article about video players in ASO 4.1, but it is in Polish. You will have to translate it into your language.http://www.amigaone.pl/?p=3345
Quote:
Only in third place do I see Dvplayer, the other presented players can only be run from time to time as a task. It is worth noting, however, that behind the current version of DvPlayer stands a high-class professional , which is undoubtedly Hans De Ruiter
While Hans did the fundamental work in his Radeon HD/RX drivers to make HW accelerated video playback possible at all, with any video player, I doubt he is or was involved in DvPlayer development. DvPlayer is the work of Stephen Fellner.
From Trevor's blog: " Fast forward to 2021, and I’m pleased to report that our graphics guru, Hans der Ruiter picked up where Stephen left off and has produced a new beta version of DvPlayer which is currently under test."
Hans added hardware accelerated vaapi support for HD and RX cards
Yeah, Hans added va-api support to DvPlayer that for sure, because i testing this some time ago and Hans fixing some bugs related to. But if to choose Emotion or DvPlayer : Emotion still better in terms of rewind the video. While DvPlayer visually with modern skin looks a bit more polished.
@Maijestro If you have read the Polish articicle, the V.A.M.P. player is the solution to play old Amiga formats not to play videos for speed problems and it isn't possible to use hardware acceleration or AltiVec, Hollywood doesn't use these solutions. But it also is a good solution to play or ser all classic Amiga formats, animation, pictures, sounds, songs like mod, etc.
Templario wrote:@Maijestro If you have read the Polish articicle, the V.A.M.P. player is the solution to play old Amiga formats not to play videos for speed problems and it isn't possible to use hardware acceleration or AltiVec, Hollywood doesn't use these solutions. But it also is a good solution to play or ser all classic Amiga formats, animation, pictures, sounds, songs like mod, etc.
I just read this Polish article, it contains a lot of information about MPlayer, Emotion and DvPlayer and also shows many examples.
I don't know V.A.M.P under AmigaOs4.1, but I will have a close look at this player. Thanks for the tip.
I'm surprised that Emotion kind of froze with the video. Have you checked Emotion's frame-skipping settings?
It looks like DVPLayer's frame-skipping might be a bit too drastic. Please submit a bug report to here. No idea when I (or someone else) will have time to look at it, but the issue needs to be recorded in the bug tracker.
@joerg
Yes, A-EON ended up contracting me to write the hardware accelerated update to DVPLayer. Stephen was too busy, and they couldn't find anyone else. That's a shame, because we really need more developers working on stuff rather than getting the same few people to do almost everything.
I'm surprised that Emotion kind of froze with the video. Have you checked Emotion's frame-skipping settings?
Ok FrameSkip 1 seems to work under Emotion in software rendering the video plays smoothly but there are sound dropouts. CPU utilization is around 80-96%.
Since I only tested software mode, they shouldn't waste time improving DvPlayer for software rendering. No real AmigaNG (Pegasos 2) will be able to play 720P videos without 3D acceleration, so it would be a waste of time.
Emotion and also DVPlayer will surely run perfectly with 3D hardware acceleration. I just compared the software mode with all 3 players and was curious which MediaPlayer achieves the best result under QEMU Pegasos 2 AmigaOs4.1.
Alternatively I use MPlayer which seems to work well with 720p videos.
Why SDL? If the (emulated) SM501/2 and it's AmigaOS 4.x driver supports YUV modes using the comp_yuv or comp_yuv2 VO should be faster.
MPlayer Comp_Yuv or Comp_yuv2 does not give me any video output only the sound is played. The video output Comp (80% cpu load) works and seems to be a bit faster than the SDL output (100% cpu load), but cannot be switched to full screen and dragging/zooming windows does not work either.
Why SDL? If the (emulated) SM501/2 and it's AmigaOS 4.x driver supports YUV modes using the comp_yuv or comp_yuv2 VO should be faster.
The YUV color conversion is likely not emulate in QEMU. If someone is interested to do that, search for SM502 MMCC Databook for docs and look in qemu/hw/display/sm501.c to add support for it but maybe first check that this works on real SM502 at all.
I would like to correct my results after further testing with Emotion/Mplayer and DvPlayer.
I'm not sure how these 3 players work on real hardware and also accelerated, but accelerated under Qemu without 16 bit. Does DvPlayer run best on videos under 720P. I'm glad I bought DVPLayer, I always thought it was only for CD/DVD playback, but not that it already handles all kinds of formats.
Hopefully they are still working on DVPlayer, it's a really good product and for me a clear buy recommendation.
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