Video playback

[sorkom]

Good hello all,

I just installed OpenBSD 6.1 on my Lenovo Ideapad 500 and can boot into cwm with no problems. I've installed Firefox and mplayer onto it and have also copied a video file over to it (an exercise video). The processor is a Core i7 with 12GB RAM and a 15.6" display. I tested it with YouTube and found no problems at all. It defaults to playing 1080 video and has no performance problems at full screen. The problem is when I try to use mplayer to play the video as it plays very slowly and has clear lag between screen output and sound. I've run fw_update and saw it installed the radeon drivers for the built-in video card.

Does anyone know how to resolve this issue? If so, how?

Thanks in advance.

[scottro]

Is mpv available for OpenBSD? If so, it might be worth a try. (sort of a fork of a fork of mplayer---forkception?)

[jggimi]

Yes, mpv is available. It's my primary video player.

[sacerdos_daemonis]

To get mpv, mplayer and VLC to work properly on my hardware I had to choose an appropriate video output method. vo = x11 in mpv.conf. For VLC, /Preferences/Video/Output/X11 video output (XCB). Experiment until you find which option works for you.

[scottro]

There's also ffplay. A fairly useless test on an old version of what was CURRENT, but is now outdated, didn't work that well with mpv, but worked better with ffplay. Tomorrow, if I have time, I'll put OpenBSD-6.1 on that laptop. However, it is a completely different model than yours, a yoga2, with Intel video, so even if it works for me, it may not work for you.

[e1-531g]

Look at this thread:
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.p...0016#post60086

If you would like to check whether yours GPU is accelerating OpenGL-based programs you could use this command:

/usr/X11R6/bin/glxinfo | grep -E -e 'direct rendering' -e  ' {4}Device' -e ' {4}Accelerated' -e '^OpenGL [v,r,v].* string'

You can also use glxgears benchmark and simultaneously look at cpu usage (top command);. Keep in mind this benchmark is too simple to decide which graphics card is better, but is enough to judge whether you have acceleration.

vblank_mode=1 /usr/X11R6/bin/glxgears  & /bin/sleep 15.4 ; pkill glxgears

[scottro]

Hrm, thought I posted this last night, but anyway, I had the same results on a fresh install of 6.1 on a yoga2 with an Intel video card. Using mpv gave me choppy, hard to watch video, while ffplay gave me normal playback. However, another oddity was that ffplay didn't play the subtitles of an mkv video.

[jggimi]

The mpv and mplayer applications select from multiple "video output drivers" which use different rendering subsystems such as SDL and OpenGL. This might be why sorkom has different results using Firefox and mplayer on the same hardware -- the default renderer being used by each application may be different.

[scottro]

For me, my quick workaround is using ffplay. If I _really _ need subtitles, I'll embed them with ffmpeg.

Obligatory xkcd about workarounds

https://xkcd.com/1822/

[sorkom]

Hello all and thanks for all your help thus far. I used the code listed above to determine that the video on my laptop is not accelerated but that my desktop is, both of which have Intel Corei7 processors. Now I need to enable acceleration. Thanks again.

[e1-531g]

Whether or not OpenBSD supports your laptop GPU depends on the generation of this GPU. As far as I am concerned Skylake and Kaby Lake are not supported yet. IMHO they are will be in future, because Intel GPUs are favorable in open source operating systems (AMD isn't that bad in Gnu/Linux distros too), but we don't know when. Maybe OpenBSD Devs will update drivers in 2017, maybe in 2018, maybe later.
Anyway you can find details about your hardware in dmesg(8) (built-in base system) and lspci (third-party pciutils package).

[sorkom]

Ah, maybe that's why, my desktop has accelerated graphics, because it's an older (Haswell) CPU whilst this one is a newer Skylake chip. Thanks all. Here's to hoping 6.2 fixes this.

[scottro]

I also just tried on an older Thinkpad L420 and there, mpv works perfectly.

[e1-531g]

Mpv can work without OpenGL acceleration if you use appropriate video output.
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.p...0016#post60086

[scottro]

Cool, I'll try that tonight.
Just to keep me from having to click when I look at this this evening, the suggestion is

mpv -vo help

Then,

mpv -vo xv myfile.mp4

UPDATE: Yup, that did the trick and made mpv's video playback run smoothly. Thanks again.