Pixelated Player

[Harald Atta]

Afterspending a weekend on getting everything working on Arch, this is the last thing I need to get it fully usable, been trying to figure it out for a few days already.

Basically, when playing mkv files I get huge pixelation issues.

Running Arch on Asus 306UA - the GPU is Intel HD Graphics 520. Tried it with and without the xf86-video-intel driver. I'd prefer to stay with it, because I couldn't get the 1920x1080 resolution working otherwise. I use the i3wm if that's relevant. I'm sure these videos are not corrupted, could run them on windows or other linux distros without any problems. Tried video players: VLC, mpv media player, mplayer media player. I did try the "TearFree" option as specified on the wiki page for intel graphics.

Did you install something to make use of hardware video acceleration? It might be broken. The different video players should have options to choose between software and hardware and you could use that to compare.

Compton should not have any effect on pixelation, but try playing the files without it. I suspect that your hardware just isn't powerful enough to play 10-bit H264 videos. For reference, try playing some 8-bit H264 MKV.

Thanks Harikon. I tried a couple of versions of flash 10 but neither worked. Some websites just say the version is too old and content will not play at all. When I could get it to work the problem was unfortunately still present

It really is very frustrating. I was wondering if it would help if I performed a system restore, going as far back as possible and hope it takes me back to before the most recent flash update was installed? I can't think what else to do and I'm really not a technically minded person at all

Thank you for your reply Jeromie. I am a complete novice when it comes to anything technical so not entirely sure what you mean by network throughput. I am assuming this is the quality of communication between my computer and the source of the video file. However, the problem is present with videos that I have downloaded to my computer. When I play them via Windows Media Player, the playback is fine, but when played via Realplayer, which I believe uses flash, they become pixelated.

I first noticed a quality issue when streaming videos on a site called jibjab.com. I have been using this site for many months and playback quality had always been acceptable - not HD but generally ok. I used their site most days so I immediately noticed when recently the videos appeared poor quality/pixelated. I contacted their customer support and after many checks established the problem was not at their end. Later that day, I noticed that a video one of my friends had posted on facebook also appeared pixelated. When I downloaded this particular video to my laptop and played it through Windows Media Player, there was no pixelation. When I opened it in Realplayer, it was once again pixelated. Today, another video which appeared on facebook seemed to be playing ok, and I noticed it was in HD, when I switched it to SD it became very pixelated (more so than you would expect from SD). I am not sure when it was in HD if it was truly HD but I know the quality seemed ok. Also, I have not noticed a huge difference in quality when watching videos on youtube (which again is confusing as I thought youtube used flash).

The reason I am so keen to get this issue fixed is because certain videos cannot be downloaded to my laptop in order to watch them using Windows Media Player. I know that jibjab charge for every download and the only way to avoid this is to watch online.

These issues have got me completely baffled and being in no way technically minded my knowledge of what 'checks' I can perform to establish the reasons behind this is limited. If anybody can point me in the right direction it would be very much appreciated.

Here is a screenshot of my friends video when I right click. There doesn't seem to be any option to play online videos through media player as far as I can see. Also when I play a video through Realplayer and right click, I get the same menu, so I assumed that meant it is using flash?

Video.js is a JavaScript and CSS library that makes it easier to work with and build on HTML5 video. This is also known as an HTML5 Video Player. Video.js provides a common controls skin built in HTML/CSS, fixes cross-browser inconsistencies, adds additional features like fullscreen and subtitles, manages the fallback to Flash or other playback technologies when HTML5 video isn't supported, and also provides a consistent JavaScript API for interacting with the video.

Thanks Harikon. With the jibjab site, you are probably right in respect of the video previews as when I uninstalled flash they still played, however, once you personalise a video, the resulting video is then played using flash player (when you right click you get the same as the preview I showed on my previous message). Once I had uninstalled flash, these videos would not play. Also, if the flash update had broken something within the jibjab player then why would it also be affecting other videos that use flash?

2.) Confirmation that the issue occurs both with Hardware Acceleration enabled and disabled (Right-Click on a Flash movie, choose Settings, click the left-most tab, uncheck Use Hardware Acceeleration, then refresh the page)

Thanks for your reply Jeromie. Please find below a link to one of the videos that I have had problems with. I can confirm that the problem occurs with Hardware Acceleration enabled and also when it is disabled.

I bet that the video that you got directly from Tim (the one you're watching in Windows Media Player) is much better quality than the stream that's served from Facebook. The Facebook stream looks like a low-resolution video, and it's universally chunky on all of my machines.

That said your GPU drivers *are* from 2008, which pre-dates all of the hardware acceleration work in Flash, so it's probably a good idea to update to current versions anyway. I doubt it will fix this particular problem (and I don't think the problem is with Flash here), but Sony has drivers from 2013 available for your laptop. Sony : VPCEB1E0E : VAIO Update

Thanks for the link to the page to update drivers, however, I am not sure which one I need to download! Could you point me in the right direction please? I have never installed new drivers before - is it easy to do?

I have installed the updated driver but it hasn't made any difference. In fact, I am a little concerned as it appears to have removed a shortcut for something from my desktop. There is a gap where I am sure there was previously an icon, but I can't remember what was there. Is it likely to have removed anything?

Also, I am convinced the problem lies with flash as the problem only occurs when videos are played through flash. I have various videos saved on my laptop and when played through Realplayer (which I believe is flash based) they appear pixelated, but the exact same file played through Windows Media Player is fine.

I'm wondering if your downloader is doing something smart, like getting the HD version of the video. Is the video you've saved significantly bigger? How are you saving the video? I downloaded RealPlayer Cloud and tried that, but it didn't work in any of my browsers. The service that did let me save the video as a web-based service and took the URL of the facebook page and just gave me the same low-quality video.

I am simply using the default YouTube embed code (generated by YouTube) to display videos on my website. With the layout that uses a fairly narrow width (320px wide) for the YouTube player, the video thumbnail is a very low quality that is visibly pixelated. However, with the layout that uses a fairly wide width (1100px wide) for the YouTube player, the video thumbnail is the high resolution version and looks great.

Basically YT send multiple dimension of thumbnail, if ur container is smaller that 321px then the smallest thumbnail will get loaded that is "width": 120,"height": 90. this is root-cause of this issue.

After a bunch of trial and error, I found that increasing the height attribute in the iframe tag by 1 forced the YouTube player to use a higher resolution thumbnail. Hope this saves you some time if you run into a similar issue...

After upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 I immediately noticed an issue whereby VLC now shows terrible video when you skip around, which only appears to fix itself after a few seconds, which I am guessing when it next meets a keyframe. This can be shown in the screenshot below:

I notice that if I pause the video, skip to any location, wait a second or two, and then play, the video will be fine. I just need VLC to wait until it is ready instead of trying to plow on immediately with the audio and trying to get the video to sync up.

Other media players like mpv media player just work in this regard, but I noticed mpv media player doesn't allow me to skip to the next video for some reason which is why I'm going back to trying to fix VLC.

I just installed Xubuntu on my netbook and VLC works on there perfectly well. I tried both VLC 2.2.2 and 2.2.4 from the PPA. This issue looks like its Ubuntu Desktop specific or to do with the fact that my desktop monitor runs through an Nvidia GPU (but have tested using nouveau drivers).

I have uploaded a youtube video trying to demonstrate the change in behaviour where the audio never stops playing as you skip around, but the video will be "paused" and then kick in as pixelated before eventually sorting itself out. Normally both the audio and video would kick in together once the player is ready and there would be no video pixelation as shown here in this video of Xubuntu 16.04 using VLC.

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