Comments on: Mplayer-vdpau: Matroska (.mkv) and AVCHD (.mts) now both working

By: acmelab68

acmelab68 — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:30:00 +0000

[UPDATE]the changes below and additionally running Gnome (metacity) and not KDE4.1 (KWin) made all Matroska (.mkv) videos work.
I’ve noticed this, the moment I went back to the KDE4.1 Plasma desktop, and ran the last tested Video again. It gave me again the “Error 23″. I went back to Gnome and it was fine, back again to KDE resulted in “Error 23″. So it was reproducible every time.
I wasn’t using either in Gnome nor in KDE compositing (no Gnome’s built-in, not the one of KWin and not Compiz)

It seams KWin preallocate (wild guess) too much video ram, so mplayer-vdpau can’t to the same anymore.

With the solution described below, and using Gnome I’ve been able to play all approx. 20 .mkv flawlessly.
I still had tearing, and turning on TwinView resulted also under Gnome in an “Error 23″ again.
——————————————-

@Kyle Brandt
Hi,
I didn’t touch line 94

NUM_VIDEO_SURFACE_H264 = 17

but set also in libvo/vo_vdpau.c in line 704

max_references = ((12 * 1024 * 1024) / surf_size) + 11;

to 11.
I’ve tested this constellation with approximately 20 1080p movies, and found only one which keeps giving me the “Error 23” thing.

The solution above is a dirty hack, since the allocation of the memory isn’t calculated, but guessed, and this on a by far too high basis.
Card with less than 512MB memory and running additional X applications and also using Compiz may run into trouble again.

Well – I’m going it to use it this way, knowing it’s a workaround and waiting for the next version of mplayer-vdpau.

By: Kyle Brandt

Kyle Brandt — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:12:17 +0000

@acmelab68
I have a 512mb card, and haven’t got that error yet — I have tested at least 10 different 1080p files (full length films).

This might help: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1877372&postcount=12
Which I think means you would want to edit the following line:
#define NUM_VIDEO_SURFACES_H264 17 // (1 frame being decoded, up to 16 references)

Did you keep the suggested change at + 2 or set it to something higher? The highest I have had to set it is 8…

By: acmelab68

acmelab68 — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:44:58 +0000

@Kyle Brandt
I’ve got “Error 25″ when trying to play one video, and your suggested solution worked fine. But now I’m getting Error “23 at libvo/vo_vdpau.c:791″, what means there is not enough video memory. Closing all X applications didn’t help, neither did a fresh KDE restart.
Shouldn’t 512MB video RAM be enough to play a 1080p movie? Strange.

Regards,
Andreas

By: acmelab68

acmelab68 — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:40:41 +0000

Wow, this is what I call a constructive comment!
Thanks a lot!

Regards,
Andreas

By: Kyle Brandt

Kyle Brandt — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:54:18 +0000

With this build I was getting the following error with 1080p H.264 mkv files:
“Error 25 at libvo/vo_vdpau.c:992″

To fixed this I change line 704 in libvo/vo_vdpau to:
max_references = ((12 * 1024 * 1024) / surf_size) + 2; //2 more (ugly hack)

After making the change I ran ‘make’ in the mplayer-vdpau folder ( no need to run checkout-patch-build.sh )

You may need to increase ‘+ 2′ to something higher depending on the video.

Thanks acmelab for this blog!