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Video performance

Asked by Max Jiang

Hello, I have been playing around with the python client 1.2.1 on Ubuntu 10.04 and noticed the video performance for h.264 files are poorer than they are being played in a generic media player. Since libavg allows stacking regions and transparent background I guess that is the cause. I know h.264 are decoded mostly on cpus (except the case of VDPAU). However, moving from a single core Atom D425 to dual core D525 (both GMA 3150 graphics, 1G DDR2) does not see much improvement in decoding a single h.264 720p file. By looking at process only one mutlithreaded core is being used. I noticed both cores are utilised only when playing multiple videos in multiple regions. Do these observations seem alright? Is this the most optimised performance I can get on this hardware setup?

Cheers,
M.

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Alex Harrington (alexharrington) said : 		#1

Hi Max

1.2 series has no support for hardware video decoding. It's all done on CPU in a single thread per video instance I believe. That's how libavg handles it - we don't have any control over it.

The 1.3.1 release uses VDPAU if it's available to do hardware video decoding which allows for example Big Buck Bunny to play in full 1080p on my single core 1.6GHz Atom based test machine.

Libavg 1.7 has just been released which has more support for hardware video decoding - I'm not sure if your particular video chipset is supported or not.

We'll be moving towards libavg 1.7 as the 1.3 series progresses so if there is some benefit in using that release on Intel hardware you'll see it at that point.

Alex

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Max Jiang (maxjiang) said : 		#2

Thank you Alex.