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Update on mplayer support for Linux/SPARC

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Antonello

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Sep 30, 2003, 11:00:19 AM9/30/03
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Hi there,
after further investigation, I collected some (I hope) interesting bugs
in mplayer for Sparc under Debian/Unstable.

Mplayer-1.0pre1
Crashes badly when opening video streams using the X11 driver on 24-bit
framebuffers (both the ATI/PGX and the Creator FFB2+ that I own). If the
PGX is set to 16 bit, video is rendered correctly. Using SDL driver,
video is rendered correcly on the PGX, and with wrong colors on the
Creator FFB2+. mplayer is compiled with mlib support.

Mplayer-0.91
Video is rendered correctly with both X11 and SDL drivers on the PGX,
both at 16 and 24 bit resolution. Wrong colors are outputted on the
Creator (24 bit) when using mplayer via a standard shell.
Surprisingly, when using the GUI on the Creator the graphical remote
control appears in dark blue color, but the movie colors are correct
using X11 driver (SDL is not supported in gmplayer). mplayer is compiled
with mlib support even in this case.

It's a mlib issue or mplayer's fault in your opinion? 0.91 works quite
well on the PGX, but there's no way to use mplayer+creator correctly.

Bye,
Antonello.

--
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David S. Miller

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Oct 1, 2003, 4:50:16 AM10/1/03
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On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 16:54:05 +0200
Antonello <e...@libero.it> wrote:

> It's a mlib issue or mplayer's fault in your opinion? 0.91 works quite
> well on the PGX, but there's no way to use mplayer+creator correctly.

I think it's mplayer bug, try recompiling with mlib disabled
which will make this easy to confirm.

Antonello

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Oct 1, 2003, 5:50:13 PM10/1/03
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On Wednesday 01 October 2003 10:41, David S. Miller wrote:

> > It's a mlib issue or mplayer's fault in your opinion? 0.91 works quite
> > well on the PGX, but there's no way to use mplayer+creator correctly.
> I think it's mplayer bug, try recompiling with mlib disabled
> which will make this easy to confirm.

It's not a mlib issue.
Compiling without mlib just slows down the whole lot but doesn't solve this
issue. Colors are rendered the wrong way indipendently of the video output
used (x11,sdl) with or without mlib.
So, it's an mplayer bug. I found no feedback addresses on the mplayer web
site, do someone on the list know how to get in touch with the mplayer team
for a bug report?

P.s.: Latest XMMS upstream in Unstable is buggy, too. It renders just noise
and no sound.

--
Antonello Iunco <etn at libero dot it> - Natural Born Betatester
Cruising the Web on a (Modified) Debian-Powered Sun Ultra10

Matt Fletcher

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Oct 2, 2003, 5:00:18 AM10/2/03
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On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 11:35:55PM +0200, Antonello wrote:

> So, it's an mplayer bug. I found no feedback addresses on the mplayer web
> site, do someone on the list know how to get in touch with the mplayer team
> for a bug report?

DOCS/en/bugreports.html in mplayer source...

matt

Erwann Abalea

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Oct 2, 2003, 5:20:09 AM10/2/03
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Hi,

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Antonello wrote:

> after further investigation, I collected some (I hope) interesting bugs
> in mplayer for Sparc under Debian/Unstable.

I'm running Debian/Stable, but I compiled Mplayer 1.0pre1 from an Unstable
deb-src, and I tested it on a Divx film on my Ultra2 with a Creator3D.

> Mplayer-1.0pre1
> Crashes badly when opening video streams using the X11 driver on 24-bit
> framebuffers (both the ATI/PGX and the Creator FFB2+ that I own). If the
> PGX is set to 16 bit, video is rendered correctly. Using SDL driver,
> video is rendered correcly on the PGX, and with wrong colors on the
> Creator FFB2+. mplayer is compiled with mlib support.

I run X in 24 bits, and I use the x11 driver (no other available for me).
The colors were wrong at the first times, but it suddenly "fell working"
(I wanted to fast forward my movie, so I used the -idx command line
switch, and suddenly the colors were good).

Now, even if I don't specify the -idx switch, or if I call gmplayer, the
colors are still good. I'll shut down X and restart it to see if something
changed.

How can I say if mplayer was compiled with mlib support? Will a 'ldd
/usr/bin/mplayer' show something, or is something loaded at runtime?

--
Erwann ABALEA <eab...@certplus.com> - RSA PGP Key ID: 0x2D0EABD5
-----
All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

Antonello

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Oct 2, 2003, 5:30:17 AM10/2/03
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On Thu, 2 Oct 2003 11:11:29 +0200 (CEST)
Erwann Abalea <erwann...@certplus.com> wrote:

> > Mplayer-1.0pre1
> > Crashes badly when opening video streams using the X11 driver on 24-bit

> I run X in 24 bits, and I use the x11 driver (no other available for me).
> The colors were wrong at the first times, but it suddenly "fell working"
> (I wanted to fast forward my movie, so I used the -idx command line
> switch, and suddenly the colors were good).

I'll try adding -idx, then.
Where did you find the source deb-src? do you mean the official Debian
archive?

> How can I say if mplayer was compiled with mlib support? Will a 'ldd
> /usr/bin/mplayer' show something, or is something loaded at runtime?

If compiled with mlib, mplayer outputs in console a message that sounds
like: "using mlib for colorspace transform"

If you haven't enabled mlib yet, I advice you to do it, since the
performance boost (at no additional cost) is remarkable. I posted a
pico-howto on this subject some time ago (with the precious help of Mr.
Miller), you can find it in the mailing list archives.

Bye,
Antonello
--
Antonello <e...@libero.it>

Erwann Abalea

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Oct 2, 2003, 9:00:19 AM10/2/03
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On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Antonello wrote:

> Where did you find the source deb-src? do you mean the official Debian
> archive?

Sorry, that was an older version (0.90-rc5). I downloaded the 1.0pre1
version from the MPlayer home page, there's a debian/ directory in the
archive, and a 'dpkg-buildpackage' does the rest. The resulting debian
package is named mplayer_0.90cvs_sparc.deb, though.

> > How can I say if mplayer was compiled with mlib support? Will a 'ldd
> > /usr/bin/mplayer' show something, or is something loaded at runtime?
>
> If compiled with mlib, mplayer outputs in console a message that sounds
> like: "using mlib for colorspace transform"

I'll test it when I'll be back home.

> If you haven't enabled mlib yet, I advice you to do it, since the
> performance boost (at no additional cost) is remarkable. I posted a
> pico-howto on this subject some time ago (with the precious help of Mr.
> Miller), you can find it in the mailing list archives.

I found your pico-howto, and I'll test it. I'm downloading the libmlib
packages, I'll test them later. Thanks.

BTW, without mlib, I can get a pretty good video experience on my 300 MHz
Ultra2, but I have to allow the player to drop frames to get audio/video
sync. When I'm only watching the video and nothing else runs, I sometimes
can notice that frames were dropped; the margin is very low, I can't even
run a simple 'top' in a console, or I loose too much frames. The film was
accessed by NFS, over a 10 MBps link (yes, between my workstation and my
fileserver, there's a 10 MBps hub somewhere, I have to find a cheap and
small 100 MBps one).

--
Erwann ABALEA <eab...@certplus.com> - RSA PGP Key ID: 0x2D0EABD5
-----

Le netétiquette n'est qu'une vaste fumisterie,il faut de l'argent pour
fonctionner,à force,en France de refuser tout rapport sain avec
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Antonello

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Oct 2, 2003, 10:30:25 AM10/2/03
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On Thu, 2 Oct 2003 14:27:48 +0200 (CEST)
Erwann Abalea <erwann...@certplus.com> wrote:

> BTW, without mlib, I can get a pretty good video experience on my 300 MHz
> Ultra2, but I have to allow the player to drop frames to get audio/video
> sync. When I'm only watching the video and nothing else runs, I sometimes

I solved many AV sync issues by using SDL audio and video output
drivers. However, on my Ultra 10, maybe because of the SLOW ide
controller and of the huge windowing system that I use (KDE 3, dual
display) it's quite impossible to watch a movie with a human-compliant
frame rate (at least on the PGX) ;). With mlib and the Creator board
instead I'm able to watch a movie (windowed, not in fullscreen mode)
with frame dropping disabled. I do have a SCSI controller, and an
external SCSI box for 6 SCA disks (think it's called an UniPack), but
the disks are old and their capacity is limited. I think the lack of
decent IDE busmastering on the Ultra10 is the main reason for my system
being slow as a little snail ;).

Now I'm trying to convince my employer to buy a new Sun workstation to
replace my x86 PC. I would to run Debian on it (side by side with
Solaris), so I am wondering if someone the list might give me some
advice on the most Penguin-compatible and valuable workstation to buy
(at a reasonable price, of course) ;). Any suggestion is appreciated ;)

Bye,
Antonello

--
Antonello <e...@libero.it> ICQ 8442040-MSN e...@libero.it - phone: ask :P

There will be no consolation prize / this time the bone is broken clean
no baptism, no reprise / and no sweet taste of victory [Jann Arden]

David S. Miller

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Oct 3, 2003, 4:20:14 AM10/3/03
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On Thu, 2 Oct 2003 14:27:48 +0200 (CEST)
Erwann Abalea <erwann...@certplus.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Antonello wrote:
>
> > If you haven't enabled mlib yet, I advice you to do it, since the
> > performance boost (at no additional cost) is remarkable. I posted a
> > pico-howto on this subject some time ago (with the precious help of Mr.
> > Miller), you can find it in the mailing list archives.
>
> I found your pico-howto, and I'll test it. I'm downloading the libmlib
> packages, I'll test them later. Thanks.

FWIW, I wrote all the VIS routines for IDCT, motion compensation,
and yuv2rgb conversions for libmpeg2. I'm working with the libmpeg2
maintainer to integrate my work.

The IDCT part needs a little more work but otherwise it's %100
complete (and yes much faster than Sun's crap in mlib :)

Once I have all of this work done I'll make an effort to create a
patch for mplayer-1.0preX and maybe even try to figure out that
color problem (reds and blues are reversed in every pixel which
points to some kind of endianness bug). However I encourage
Antonello to still file the bug in the mplayer bug area so that
they know about it.

Antonello

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Oct 3, 2003, 4:40:11 AM10/3/03
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On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 01:11:28 -0700
"David S. Miller" <da...@redhat.com> wrote:

> Once I have all of this work done I'll make an effort to create a
> patch for mplayer-1.0preX and maybe even try to figure out that
> color problem (reds and blues are reversed in every pixel which
> points to some kind of endianness bug). However I encourage

Using the older mplayer 0.91, my problem is quite different: on the
Creator (FFB2+, not 3D) the dark scenes are rendered correctly, with
visible "Robocop-termograph-like" artifacts on the shinier ones. It
smells like the white colour is badly interpreted by mplayer. Taking a
screenshot of the mplayer windows with Ksnapshot shows the correct
colors in the screenshot itself, while the real mplayer window is still
garbled. Maybe a YUV2RGB issue? or X11 driver, possibly. 1.0preX seems
to have the same problem (and crashes at 24 bits of color depth on both
PGX and Creator).

Have a great day,
Antonello.

--
Antonello <e...@libero.it> ICQ 8442040-MSN e...@libero.it - phone: ask :P

There will be no consolation prize / this time the bone is broken clean
no baptism, no reprise / and no sweet taste of victory [Jann Arden]

Erwann Abalea

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Oct 12, 2003, 1:50:12 PM10/12/03
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On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, David S. Miller wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003 14:27:48 +0200 (CEST)
> Erwann Abalea <erwann...@certplus.com> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Antonello wrote:
> >
> > > If you haven't enabled mlib yet, I advice you to do it, since the
> > > performance boost (at no additional cost) is remarkable. I posted a
> > > pico-howto on this subject some time ago (with the precious help of Mr.
> > > Miller), you can find it in the mailing list archives.
> >
> > I found your pico-howto, and I'll test it. I'm downloading the libmlib
> > packages, I'll test them later. Thanks.

I downloaded the SUNWmlib 2.2 packages, and installed the sparcv8plus+vis
library and headers in the proper places (and done a symbolic link from
libmlib.so to libmlib.so.2).

I can't compile mplayer with mlib support, I tried with both
mplayer-1.0pre1 and pre2. Sometimes mplayer crashes, sometimes I can't
even start it (when I try to execute it or simply when I try a 'ldd
mplayer', I get: "Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dynamic-link.h: 62:
elf_get_dynamic_info: Assertion `! "bad dynamic tag"' failed!"). When this
happens, the linker told me just before that libmlib.so depends on
libc.so.1 and libm.so.1, which don't exist on my system. I tried making
symbolic links to libc.so.6 and libm.so.6, with no luck.

I use CFLAGS="-O4 -mcpu=v9 -mtune=ultrasparc -ffast-math
-fomit-frame-pointer -pipe", and without mlib, I can get a decent speed
(I still must drop frames, though).

Antonello, I also have weird colors on my Creator3D card when playing DIVX
movies. Here's what I do to solve this:
- if you run gmplayer, run it with an additional: "-vf rgb2bgr=swap"
- if you run mplayer, run it with the same line as above, but also
decrease the contrast manually (key 1, not the one from the keypad); I
can't change it by a command line

That works for me, and drops a little more frames.
I use the x11 video output driver, not sdl (which is slower for me).

--
Erwann ABALEA <eab...@certplus.com> - RSA PGP Key ID: 0x2D0EABD5
-----

Think carefully before wishing, it might just come true.

Antonello

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Oct 14, 2003, 6:40:05 PM10/14/03
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On Sunday 12 October 2003 19:42, Erwann Abalea wrote:

> I can't compile mplayer with mlib support, I tried with both
> mplayer-1.0pre1 and pre2. Sometimes mplayer crashes, sometimes I can't
> even start it (when I try to execute it or simply when I try a 'ldd
> mplayer', I get: "Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dynamic-link.h: 62:

I don't get this error, however mplayer doesn't display the "using mlib for
colorspace transform" message. Pre1/2 seems to run a little slower than 0.9x,
too.

> Antonello, I also have weird colors on my Creator3D card when playing DIVX
> movies. Here's what I do to solve this:
> - if you run gmplayer, run it with an additional: "-vf rgb2bgr=swap"

With pre1 and pre2, mplayer crashes badly when even trying this.

--
  .''`.     Antonello Iunco <etn at libero dot it>
 : :'  :
 `. `'`     Natural Born Betatester
   `- Cruising the Web on a (Modified) Debian-Powered Sun Ultra10
-debian- Free people choose free software!

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