Confused getting vaapi/gstreamer working on intel i965

tuppe666 · Guru Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 423

I'm very confused with accelerated video most of the topics on here are for the Nvidia chipset and use mplayer/ffmpeg, What I want is accelerated Video through Intel i965 and Totem/gstreamer

I have installed

Gusar · Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 11:56 pm Post subject:

That message is from the AC3 decoder, it's irrelevant really. I think there's a way to make it go away, but you won't notice if AC3 decoding got slightly faster. so ignore it.

What's your graphic card? And what video are you trying to play? I'm only asking out of curiosity really. I can't help because I don't have any experience with Totem/Gstreamer. You could try some other player - VLC or search for a mplayer-vaapi ebuild. I did actually play with mplayer-vaapi and got hardware h264 decoding working. It was a while back though, I'm not on the Blu-ray bandwagon yet, so I don't need hardware decoding.

tuppe666 · Guru Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 423

Just playing some MKV files (H.264/AC3) There is nothing wrong with how they play. I use an Intel GMA X4500HD.

Hypnos · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 8:22 am Post subject:

While VAAPI works for me using vlc+ffmpeg, I have not attempted it in the gstreamer pipeline. It seems one requires:

1) gstreamer VAAPI plugin. I don't see an ebuild in Gentoo bugzilla, but there's one here.

2) A video player that loads this plugin in the decoding pipeline. This suggests that totem should work out of the box when a VAAPI plugin is present.

I won't be installing totem, so this is as much help as I can offer -- good luck!
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tomk · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 9:16 am Post subject:

Moved from Multimedia to Unsupported Software, ebuilds from Bugzilla are not officially supported.
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Gusar · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 9:59 am Post subject:

Hypnos · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 10:59 am Post subject:

Gusar · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 1:10 pm Post subject:

That's news for me. Interesting.

But does it really make a difference? I mean, mpeg2 is incredibly simple to encode. Sure, we're talking HD video here, but still. My Core i3 barely gets running when decoding 720p h264 video in software, that's why I'm not bothering with vaapi. And h264 is quite a bit more complex than mpeg2. Also, you're using VLC which copies all frames back to system memory, which means it's using more resources than mplayer.

I should go download some 1080p mpeg2 samples and play around.

Edit: I'm reading the libva mailing list. Supposedly someone is working on h264 for G45. But no support for VC1 on G45 is planned. There's no VC1 support on Ironlake either, which I think sucks. There are Blu-rays that use VC1 out there. Someone asked about VC1 on Ironlake, but no reply yet.

Hypnos · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 1:53 pm Post subject:

vlc was utilizing ~40% of one CPU and 20% of another when playing 720p HD MPEG-2 content on my ULV Core 2 Duo. With VAAPI enabled, this went down to ~30% and 15%. I'm hoping for even greater offloading with H.264, which as you say is more CPU intensive.

The potential benefit of using VAAPI is better battery life -- useful when I'm watching HD content on transpacific flights. But, otherwise I'm not losing sleep over it

One thing I'd like to figure out is why Matroska videos are so much more CPU intensive than MP4s or AVIs even when the video is encoded in MPEG-4 ...
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Gusar · Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 2:41 pm Post subject:

Yeah, that does not look like much difference. And it looks high actually. It's an ULV processor, so not nearly as powerful as my Core i3, but still. I wonder how mplayer would do. Like I said, VLC uses more resources because it copies frames back into system memory. Also, pure curiosity, have you actually measured the power consumption difference between software and hardware decoding? And where do you get 720p mpeg2 video from anyway, tv recordings?

I downloaded the first segment of Big Buck Bunny from here: http://www.w6rz.net/. It claims it's 70Mbps, which is beyond huge. At most, CPU usage was 16%. So I really don't care about hardware mpeg2 decoding. Though this is a desktop machine, so power consumption is not a concern. Later I'm gonna check how my netbook handles this video. Crappy Atom processor, woohoo!!

Well, it can decode 3Mbps 720p h264 video.

That different containers give different CPU usage makes no sense. Is it actually the same video, just different container?

Hypnos · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2011 8:51 am Post subject:

Since, we're getting off-topic, sent a PM to Gusar.
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