Hello all,

I'm having some problems when playing DVD's with Totem, without the ugly plugins the video plays fine, using the CPU for about 60% but, of course no audio, with the ugly plugins video slows down a lot and pulseaudio uses the CPU for about 60%, I think that's a bit much, and still no audio.
Does anyone know how to fix this?

This is on an Efika MX nettop with Debian armhf, an external DVD player and comercial DVDs with 720x576 video @25fps and LCPM and AC3 audio, I compiled libdvdcss myself, I also tried Xine, that was even worse.

Frank.

Hi.

At this time, there are no accelerated media decoders for ArmHF. These are closed source and we're working with Freescale to get them compiled for ArmHF. This might explain the performance problems. You should check if you get better results with the default image we have on this site.

Regarding PulseAudio, make sure that "resample-method = ffmpeg" is set in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Some more info can be found in this thread:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=2094

Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

The weirdest thing just happened, normally on maverick I get very slow video and no sound, often the whole system freezes, especially with Totem, this time though I get no video but normal sound, pulseaudio was using about 4% of CPU time and Xine 2%, the whole system was running at 15 to 20%, after two songs the fun was over though, Xine crashed, with Totem I get audio and some video, 1 or 2 frames a second, Totem also stops after a few minutes. If I combine these numbers with what I saw on Debian armhf, 60% for the video, we endup with 66%, in other words on Debian armhf a media player should be able to play a regular comercial DVD, even without Neon optimizations! It's just a matter of ironing out bugs and configurations. The 60% of CPU time pulseaudio consumes on Debian armhf is not normal, it is either a misconfiguration or a bug.

Frank.

Hi.

We've seen the PulseAudio behavior before. Make sure you add this:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=2094

Keep in mind that Debian ArmHF is still at the early stages, so yes, it would very well be a bug that needs to be found and fixed.

Johan.

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Hello,

I thought I had changed that in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, turns out I hadn't, so I did, and it partially solved the problem, for Xine, not for Totem. The other problem was Xine video, after trying all sorts of things, I changed the priority for ffmeg in Xine's settings and now I have good DVD playback at 60-90% CPU usage.
The only remaining issue is that I see more mpeg artifacts than on another machine, I supose Xine prefers another mpeg decoder for a reason. I could not find any way to improve Totem's behaviour or to improve playback on Maverick.

For anyone who wants to play DVDs on Debian armhf:
You probably need to increase the root's partition and filesystem size first.
Second: modify pulseaudio's configuration file:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=2094
Then install xine-ui.
Start xine, type alt-s, that will open xine's setup, change the entry "Configurations experience level" from "Beginner" to "Master of the known universe", click the "Apply" button and go to the "Engine" tab, about one third down you will find "priority for ffmpegvideo decoder" change the entry from 0 to 1, click "Apply" and "Close".
Now you can watch DVDs.

Have fun,
Frank.

Hello,

I thought I had changed that in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, turns out I hadn't, so I did, and it partially solved the problem, for Xine, not for Totem. The other problem was Xine video, after trying all sorts of things, I changed the priority for ffmeg in Xine's settings and now I have good DVD playback at 60-90% CPU usage.
The only remaining issue is that I see more mpeg artifacts than on another machine, I supose Xine prefers another mpeg decoder for a reason. I could not find any way to improve Totem's behaviour or to improve playback on Maverick.

For anyone who wants to play DVDs on Debian armhf:
You probably need to increase the root's partition and filesystem size first.
Second: Get libdvdcss:
http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.11/
Compile and install it, configure it with:
./configure --prefix=/usr
Third: modify pulseaudio's configuration files:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=2094
Then install xine-ui.
Start xine, type alt-s, that will open xine's setup, change the entry "Configurations experience level" from "Beginner" to "Master of the known universe", click the "Apply" button and go to the "Engine" tab, about one third down you will find "priority for ffmpegvideo decoder" change the entry from 0 to 1, click "Apply" and "Close".
Now you can watch DVDs.

Have fun,
Frank.