omxplayer for MMS on Raspberry Pi

omxmplayerSince mplayer doesn’t support accelerated video playback on Raspberry Pi, we have to use omxplayer. This HowTo describes how you can make omxplayer work for MMS on a Raspberry Pi, since MMS won’t handle the omxplayer very well. Actually MMS wasn’t designed to use Mplayer (at least in my constellation). But luckily it’s not that hard to make it work, although I didn’t tested it very thoroughly yet.
Basically it needs three steps to make it work:

  • Create a omxplayer launch script
  • Reflect this change in the /etc/mms/MplayerConfig file
  • Create a key-config file, so you can control omxplayer from within MMS

Read the details below:
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Mplayer-vaapi on Oneiric (Ubuntu 11.10) for AMD/ATI HowTo

Mplayer-vaapi is an official branch from the mplayer project team and can be checked out via subversion. VAAPI is an video output device for hardware accelerated HD content playback (VC1, H264). VLC, Mplayer and maybe one day Xine can make use of it.
I’ve bought a ATI/AMD Redeon HD 5450 graphics card on a budget (35€/40$) so I can test the newest development going on. Installing Ubuntu 11.10 Server (Kernel 3.0.0.4-14-server) with openbox as window manager, I’ve been able to make mplayer-vaapi work, but don’t ask me how long it took me. If you know what to do, it’s quite simple. Actually the only thing one has to know is, that the current libva1 (version 0.32) driver is broken. And the ATI/AMD’s fglrx driver version 8.88.7 makes mplayer crash after a while. These two simple facts took me a few evening to find out.
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[HOWTO] Workaround for a broken AVCHD playback with VDPAU on Karmic

The release of Karmic Koala inspired me to upgrade to this new Ubuntu 9.10 version and also to install the latest My Media System (a light Media Center for Linux), wich is version 1.1.2 actually. All was fine, beside the playback of AVCHD footage from my Canon HF100 FullHD camcorder. I’ve noticed already some time ago, AVCHD footage doesn’t work with the ‘-fps 50‘ switch anymore. The solution for the problem, so I wrote, was to use ‘-correct-pts‘ instead. Continue reading “[HOWTO] Workaround for a broken AVCHD playback with VDPAU on Karmic”

New Mplayer slows down AVCHD footage

I’ve built the latest mplayer trunk (r29664) in order being able to play back 3gp videos with sound. All was fine and my 3gp videos had sound after I’ve installed the appropriate libraries, built and compiled the current mplayer version.
But after a while I’ve noticed, that mplayer, no matter how I’ve invoked it (with or without my mplayer-vdpau wrapper script for My Media System), played back my AVCHD footage from my Canon HF100 in slow motion (e.g. half speed), and the sound of course wasn’t in sync either. Continue reading “New Mplayer slows down AVCHD footage”

HOWTO: Missing Audio on Playing Back 3gp Video Files

I’ve recently reported about creating 3gp videos for playing them back with an average mobile phone. I’ve done this by using ffmpeg. Now – since my attention came onto 3gp video files, I was wandering if My Media System (MMS, a light Media Center unlike XBMC or MythTV), precisely speaking my mplayer-vdpau wrapper script was able to handle them also. To my surprise the video does play back, but audio is missing.

Continue reading “HOWTO: Missing Audio on Playing Back 3gp Video Files”

Creating 3gp Videos with Linux

For the impatient: Read here the compendium.

Recently I’ve bought a mid-range mobile phone for my wife. It’s a Nokia 2700 Classic for about 100€. At this price level you don’t have a sophisticated video support regarding recording or playback. You don’t have avi, wmv or flv support. The only video format the mobile phone understands is 3gp. Continue reading “Creating 3gp Videos with Linux”

Sed – Renaming with Linux [Part 2]

Some time ago I wrote an article about renaming multiple filenames [1]. Now it happened I needed to rename several subtitles for Star Trek Enterprise because, I’m using a self-made mplayer-wrapper script to load subtitles automatically. Therefor the subtitle filename, usually a Sub Rip Text (.srt) file from tvsubtitles have to be in a form like S01E01 or 1x24.

The two according lines in my mplayer-vdpau wrapper script, which I use in My Media System (MMS) looks like this: Continue reading “Sed – Renaming with Linux [Part 2]”

Howto Map Mplayer Subtitle Commands on a Remote Control

I’ve been looking for a example where I could see, how subtitles for mplayer can be mapped on a remote control. But my search have been quite unsuccessful. Looking for lircrc, example, subtitles and mplayer didn’t return anything meaningful.

And if you build (check out) mplayer from source, there is a file called input.conf in the etc directory, where you can look up the mapping of the keyboard. At least I thought so. In the man page you can read: Continue reading “Howto Map Mplayer Subtitle Commands on a Remote Control”

VDPAU and Window Manager on Jaunty Jackalope – Ubuntu 9.04

Today I did it. I’ve upgraded my system from Intrepid Ibex(8.10) onto Jaunty Jackalope (9.04). My Ubuntu x86_64 installation offered me, as always, a couple of new packages for update, and as I wanted to update, a message box told me, I could do a whole system upgrade onto Jaunty Jackalope. So I did and it worked. I took a very long time (>1h), but I had no unpleasant surprises afterwards.
All special sources.conf entries in my apt-get config have been commented out, and I started from scratch using a new Ubuntu installation.
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VDPAU: stable 180.44 and 185.19 beta driver

There are two major highlights about the two last released Nvidia VDPAU drivers. The first one is, that the stable driver 180.44 fixed an ugly bug in the x86_64 branch, concerning the VC-1 playback. And the second even better news is, that the ugly resource problem seems to be fixed in the 185.19 beta driver. Even systems with on-board graphics adapters (shared graphics memory) seem to work now without any issues anymore.

Here are the the release news from the VDPAU point of view: Continue reading “VDPAU: stable 180.44 and 185.19 beta driver”