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Problems with High Definition Video Playback on an aging Laptop

Hi all,

I recently acquired a full-HD camcorder which supports the AVCHD standard for videos. It stores these on SDHC cards as .mts files. Great! - Until I tried to play them back on something a bit larger than the camera's internal screen, that is. When I start to play (I'm using Gnome MPlayer in Mint) the output is a disaster. It is not a film at all, just a slow succession of abruptly changing blurred thumbnails together with intermittent audio. I'm guessing my laptop's hardware isn't up to the task. Even small .mts files of around 100Meg won't render properly, even though the machine is has a 1.8Ghz processor and 1400Mb of RAM. Do I need some kind of super-duper video accelerator to play this format? The machine itself is a few years old now and I don't believe they would have supported these HI-DEF formats back then. What do I need to do to fix this? I cannot at this time tell you what the current video card is but am working on the problem....

Sigh.... Gotta go to bed now. Any points requiring answering will be dealt with in about 10hrs from now.

I think there are basically two ways to decode a stream. One is with a processor. The other is a dedicated chip to decode with. Modern systems with modern software may in some cases be able to use gpu or other chips to decode HD video.

The problem with your old system is even if you do install new software, you won't be able to easily decode the data without using the processor. The processor now needs to handle too much.

If you have access to a newer system you could boot to a live cd or usb flash and try it there. I'd bet it would work better.

To some extent even now you do need a pretty good system to handle HD video.

It can be that this is not a hardware-related issue, it can be a driver issue. Please post the output of lspci, cat /proc/cpuinfo and cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4099961)

It can be that this is not a hardware-related issue, it can be a driver issue. Please post the output of lspci, cat /proc/cpuinfo and cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

OK, thanks. Here they are:

Code:

~ $ lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 671MX

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS AGP Port (virtual PCI-to-PCI bridge)

00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS968 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 01)

00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)

00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)

00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)

00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller

00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 191 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 02)

00:05.0 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SATA Controller / IDE mode (rev 03)

00:06.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge

00:07.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge

00:0f.0 Audio device: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Azalia Audio Controller

00:1f.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 771/671 PCIE VGA Display Adapter (rev 10)

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

Second command:

Code:

~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor        : 0

vendor_id        : GenuineIntel

cpu family        : 6

model                : 22

model name        : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU          540  @ 1.86GHz

stepping        : 1

cpu MHz                : 1867.018

cache size        : 1024 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug                : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu                : yes

fpu_exception        : yes

cpuid level        : 10

wp                : yes

flags                : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc up arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm

bogomips        : 3734.03

clflush size        : 64

cache_alignment        : 64

address sizes        : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management:

The last one produces an output which is way too long for LQ's posting limit. If I can grep something out of it, though, please let me know.

Oh yuck, that thing will never play HD, I'm sorry, you need a better graphics card, I'd recommend one with vdpau, then it will play any HD vid. I recommend nvidia.

Thanks, TM.
Well rather than waste time and money upgrading this laptop I think I will buy the card you suggest for my main desktop which is much more up to date and has tons of RAM and processor speed etc. It will be a damn site easier to install for one thing!

Well, check to make sure you don't already have a good card on your desktop, check here for support:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

Quote:

Originally Posted by H_TeXMeX_H (Post 4100592)

Well, check to make sure you don't already have a good card on your desktop

Oh yes, I would do that anyway. I'm not totally Clueless. :)

OHhhhhhhh!

Now I see your tag line.

just quickly read this thread so may have missed something.
your issue is choppy video slow playing video ?
if you copy the file from the sd card to hard drive and play it does it still happen?

Quote:

Originally Posted by mecelec415 (Post 4101138)

just quickly read this thread so may have missed something.
your issue is choppy video slow playing video ?
if you copy the file from the sd card to hard drive and play it does it still happen?

Good point. But yes, it does still happen. It seems I need a graphics card like a mini computer to process this stream. :(
But it isn't too surprising. HDTV has got to be at least as resource-hungry as the latest and best video games if you think about it.

Well I finally tracked down my desktop and have tried playing HD video on it using the latest available version of Ubuntu. It is considerably better than the laptop, but still really struggling. Same symptoms, just rather less severe. So before I go and shell out on a new graphics card, I thought I would post the results of a hardware interogation on this newer machine first. Hopefully someone can spot where the bottleneck(s) is/are and point them out. Here it is:

Code:

~ $ lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS690 Host Bridge

00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS690 PCI to PCI Bridge (Internal gfx)

00:05.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS690 PCI to PCI Bridge (PCI Express Port 1)

00:06.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS690 PCI to PCI Bridge (PCI Express Port 2)

00:11.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 SATA Controller [IDE mode]

00:12.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller

00:12.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller

00:12.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller

00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller

00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700 USB OHCI1 Controller

00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller

00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 3a)

00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 IDE Controller

00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 LPC host controller

00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge

00:14.5 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI2 Controller

00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration

00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map

00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller

00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control





~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor        : 0

vendor_id        : AuthenticAMD

cpu family        : 15

model                : 107

model name        : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+

stepping        : 2

cpu MHz                : 1000.000

cache size        : 512 KB

physical id        : 0

siblings        : 2

core id                : 0

cpu cores        : 2

apicid                : 0

initial apicid        : 0

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug                : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu                : yes

fpu_exception        : yes

cpuid level        : 1

wp                : yes

flags                : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch

bogomips        : 1999.33

clflush size        : 64

cache_alignment        : 64

address sizes        : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps



processor        : 1

vendor_id        : AuthenticAMD

cpu family        : 15

model                : 107

model name        : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+

stepping        : 2

cpu MHz                : 1000.000

cache size        : 512 KB

physical id        : 0

siblings        : 2

core id                : 1

cpu cores        : 2

apicid                : 1

initial apicid        : 1

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug                : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu                : yes

fpu_exception        : yes

cpuid level        : 1

wp                : yes

flags                : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch

bogomips        : 1999.33

clflush size        : 64

cache_alignment        : 64

address sizes        : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual

power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps



01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 2100

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8071 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 16)

03:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): JMicron Technology Corp. IEEE 1394 Host Controller

Also would it be advisable to increase the RAM from its current 3Gb and if so by how much?

RAM and processor are not the bottleneck here, it is your onboard-graphics-device. If you have a free PCIe-x16-slot on your motherboard I would recommend to buy a new graphicscard. Assuming that you are not a gamer I would recommend a card like the NVidia Geforce 9400 GT or Geforce GT220. They are not too expensive and should do the job.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD (Post 4118592)

Many thanks for that. I shall go out tomorrow and splash the cash. I assume the graphics card is the one where the video monitor cable connects? Best take the old card with me so as not to buy wrong replacement.