Soon: Videos with sound!

[Yngwiejo]

Just wanted to share with you that thanks to linuxstb and his work on mpegplayer plugin we are close on having video playing with sound! I was just doing some tests for him and here are the results:

MPEG-2 video stream @ 176x128 - MP3 sound stream 170Kbps Stereo 44.1Khz : 14fps

MPEG-2 video stream @ 224x128 - MP3 sound stream 170Kbps Stereo 44.1Khz : 11.7fps

Also, when using mirak's optimisation patch [[LINK]] the results were even better:

MPEG-2 video stream @ 176x128 - MP3 sound stream 170Kbps Stereo 44.1Khz : 18.4fps

MPEG-2 video stream @ 224x128 - MP3 sound stream 170Kbps Stereo 44.1Khz : 15.1fps

[DD]

Nice framerates too
Can the MP3 stream bitrate be lower (128k) and the resulting FPS be slightly higher?

[Yngwiejo]

Yes... lowering a bit the bitrate on the MP3 stream should result in slightly higher fps results. Didn't test that though yet.

Can't wait for this to get included in CVS!

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention that the sound works flawlessly!

[DD]

TBH I haven't tried video playback in RB yet ('cos of my clix) but this should be a good time to update (I'm using a build from November) and try it out.

[Yngwiejo]

Originally Posted by DD

TBH I haven't tried video playback in RB yet ('cos of my clix) but this should be a good time to update (I'm using a build from November) and try it out.

Well, just to let you know what is the case now using an up to date CVS build, it can play MPEG1 or MPEG2 streams, not multiplexed with sound (.m2v) and it manages to achieve 18.8fps for the 224x128 MPEG-2 stream mentioned above.

[itsmeguys]

Wow thats really cool. Scuse my stupidy, but does that mean video + sound will work on the H10 build of rockbox aswell?

[Yngwiejo]

Originally Posted by itsmeguys

Wow thats really cool. Scuse my stupidy, but does that mean video + sound will work on the H10 build of rockbox aswell?

Yes, it will work and with higher fps results due to the fact that 1) it has a smaller screen and 2) It is based on the PortalPlayer chip (just like iPods) and the co-processor now seems to be controled fairly enough (at least with the MpegPlayer plugin).

[Dimension Sibi]

Great news!
When do you think will this be implemented. My brother (H10) and I (H320) can't wait for it

[Yngwiejo]

As the thread title says... soon! It depends mainly from linuxstb. He is working on some glitches at the moment (eg. the menu of mpegplayer wasn't accessible) but the main work has been done for both PortalPlayer targets and Coldfire targets.

[Angryman_H10]

Great news...I followed your testing through IRC^^

[Llorean]

Lowering the MP3 bitrate will not make the FPS any higher.

The MP3 decoding is handled on the other core from the video, so they do not affect each other.

[Yngwiejo]

Originally Posted by Llorean

Lowering the MP3 bitrate will not make the FPS any higher.

The MP3 decoding is handled on the other core from the video, so they do not affect each other.

Ah, yes... I should have clarified this. But this applies only on PortalPlayer targets were the video and audio decoding are done on different cores. Lowering the bitrate of audio will help a bit on Coldfire targets since it's a single-core.

[Llorean]

Ah, so it's my mistake. Somehow I thought this was in the H10 section, because currently the primary work is on the PortalPlayer targets.

[XavierGr]

Marvelous news indeed!

2 days away from rockbox irc channel and I miss the greatest news of the month.
I will try to get a patch and start testing myself seems promising....

P.S: So it seems that rockbox will play better video than iriver too.
Then all is left is WMA (for those lost souls) and USB OTG. Then I will flash rockbox on my H300 and wipe off iriver firmware completely.

[splinter6]

how about playback controls? It sucks not being able to fast forward and rewind.

[Yngwiejo]

Originally Posted by splinter6

how about playback controls? It sucks not being able to fast forward and rewind.

This is a huge step forward for a proper video support in Rockbox. You should be respectful and cheerful that someone is working on this and managed to achieve such a progress rather than immediately whine about what's not implemented yet. Sure, playback control is an important thing and it will be implemented as soon as someone works on it.

[musichound]

This is fantastic news, especially for the H10 players. To think, just a few months ago, we were all more or less in agreement that video on the H10 would never be a possibility.

[Nork]

it would be neat to get it to work on the 3xx series. how would encoderss then work? possibly need an update to iriverter?

[Yngwiejo]

Originally Posted by Nork

it would be neat to get it to work on the 3xx series. how would encoderss then work? possibly need an update to iriverter?

iriverter has nothing to do with this. iriverter creates 220x176 MPEG4[XVID] videos @ 10fps meant for playback in iriver original firmware and NOT in Rockbox. You can create videos for Rockbox with almost every MPEG encoder you like.

For instance you can use this batch for VLC:

"C:\Progra~1\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" %1  --sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=400,width=224,height=176,acodec=mp3,ab=128,samplerate=44100}:std{access=file,mux=ps,dst=%1.mpg}

For more information about encoding click here though, when videos with sound get on CVS this page will need some updating.

[Llorean]

Just as a quick note: vb is the video bitrate, and ab is the audio bitrate in that line. Lowering them could increase performance, upping them could slow down framerate but get you better sound or video quality.

Files with a lot of voice-only audio, such as television shows can probably have half the audio bitrate without too much concernt (or at least 96). Just some tips on performance tweaking.

[Astaga]

This is incredibly exciting news! After this gets implemented I will have absolutely no reason to use the stock iriver firmware

Thanks to everyone who has made this possible!

[Danfried]

Amazing. Great news.

Since I don't use USBOTG and radio that often, video is the main reason I still boot up the original firmware.

But I thought it was settled long ago at misticriver that the fps limitation for H300 players was due to hardware and thus unavoidable! What gives?

[Llorean]

What gives is that nobody listened to me when I told them that it was untrue.