1920x1040 @ 1400 kbps: is that my limit?

[FuriousGeorge]

I have a dual opteron 180 (2.4ghz), a GeForce 8600 GT, and 2GB of RAM.

(i'm coming up with the bitrate numbers below by dividing the number of kb in the file with the run time in seconds, so they may be slightly off)

I've never had a problem playing any 1080p trailers, but then I came across a file which will artifact itself to death in VLC, or will play 20-30% slower than the accompanying audio stream in MPlayer, or will ALMOST be watchable using dragon player, assuming I restart it enough to allow the audio to resync, and ignore the more than occasional dropped frame.

This particular file is an .mkv containing avc1 video at 1400 kbps.

I started paying more attention to the trailers I can get, and I've been able to get a files as high as 1200 kbps that play fine, but I haven't been able to find anything higher than that. I've read that BluRays can have bitrates as high as 40000kbps, but by my calculations a 50 GB Dual Layer disk with a 90 minute movie comes out to about 9250 kbps.

So apparently, I don't know how to calculate bitrate correctly, but more importantly, I appear to be no where near capable of playing BluRay content on this computer, no matter how you calculate bitrate.

Is it possible that there is something off about this particular file causing it to be so difficult to play?

What kind of hardware should I have, given the fact that I won't have hardware acceleration, to enable me to play full BluRay content in software?

Also, if anyone has a test file for me to try that represents the maximum bitrate I could expect to encounter, I'd be interested to see how that goes.

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: I just read that the newest nvidia drivers do support hardware h.264... Assuming that is accurate, is it just a matter of upgrading my nvidia modules? I guess I'll find out after work tonight when I try the upgrade, if no one answers. I'm not finding anything on the wiki after a cursory glance, but I have a feeling that setting up / finding the players that support it is non-trivial.

[Gusar]

There's definitely something wrong with the way you're calculating bitrate. 1080p videos usually start at 8 mbit/s and the lowest you'll find on Blu-ray is 13 mbit/s.

As for hardware acceleration, for now you have to patch ffmpeg and mplayer. I'd advise you to use the berkano overlay, where you'll find appropriate ffmpeg and mplayer ebuilds as well as the latest nvidia driver. HW acceleration is activated with the vdpau USE flag, then you basically start mplayer with

[FuriousGeorge]

Thanks for the reply gusar.

I'm definitely glad to hear that progress is being made, but I don't really care to mess around with overlays and beta code atm.

Basically, my original concern remains. I'm just wondering if it is normal to be unable to play some 1080p content with the hardware I described (Opeteron Dual Core @ 2.4Ghz, GeForce 8600GT, 2GB RAM) in cases where there is no hardware acceleration.

I just realized the problem is that I am talking in BYTES and bitrate is obviously bits.

Therefore, the video I had trouble playing was ~12Mbps, and the other one was ~10Mbps. Do you think that there was something wrong with how this file was encoded, or was it more likely a limitation of my hardware.

I'm looking for high bitrate 1080p content so I can test the theory on my own, but that 10Mbps file is the highest bitrate I was able to find.

[Gusar]

The most likely reason you have problems with software decoding is because ffmpeg is single threaded and as such can't make use of your dual-core processor. There's a ffmpeg-mt (multithreaded) branch in development, but it's again beta code and you'd have to mess with overlays or even manual compilation, something you said you don't want to do.

Just one thing you could try - start mplayer like so:

[selig]

Interesting... I have tried some 1080p videos with mplayer on my "obsolete" system with a single-core Athlon64 4000+ (@2.4 GHz) with a Radeon X1650 Pro and it eats up about 50% of the CPU. I don't remember their bitrate though.