Comments on: HD Video Playback in Linux

By: Maarten

Maarten — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:28:43 +0000

Wow… thanks!! Very impressive indeed. I tried to play a 1080p movie (Matrix 1999) on my Thinkpad T61 (with intel GFX) with your suggested mplayer options and it runs 100% flawlessly, no matter how much action is going on on screen.
Very nice.

By: Faur

Faur — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:49:24 +0000

Hm…what about ati cards i have an ati radeon hd 4570 but i can’t get best quality?

I’ve heard about mplayerXP(it’s mplayer but use multiple cores)i tried it but cant manage to run it !

By: Luke Murphy

Luke Murphy — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:15:11 +0000

The article is now out of date.. you can play back 1080p files using most modern NVIDIA cards under linux using VDPAU with <5% CPU usage

By: Octavian Petre

Octavian Petre — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 11:06:53 +0000

Hi Johannes,

It should be possible to use an Ahtlon 64 3200+ for HD playback.

I remember seeing an fullHD content with an Ahtlon 64 2800+ at 1.8GHz (if I remember correctly) although the CPU was almost 100% utilized.

By: Martijn Bastiaan

Martijn Bastiaan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:52:16 +0000

Very nice!

It’s a shame we don’t have hardware acceleration on Linux.. oh well, let’s hope for ffmpeg to support multiple cores or AMD, to provide HA soon..

By: Johannes Jensen

Johannes Jensen — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:35:57 +0000

Great article!

We just bought a 40″ Samsung LE40A656 HDTV and are pondering whether it’s possible to view 1080p HD videos using our current HTPC: An Ahtlon 64 3200+ @ 2.2GHz with 1GiB RAM and an old GeForce 6800 GPU. What do you think? Is it at all possible?

We thought that we maybe, just maybe, could upgrade just the GPU to one that could do H.264 decoding in hardware. But that’s apparently not possible with the Linux drivers :-/ Do you have any experience with hardware accelerated H.264 decoding on Windows? How much difference in CPU usage would this setup have compared to software decoding?

I’ll try tomorrow and post my results!

By: balitwilight

balitwilight — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:30:59 +0000

Thanks for the great article. I have a Dell XPS-420 and a Mitsubishi LT46231 46″ monitor running on Ubuntu Hardy. I have a problem with mplayer (even with your configuration). When I run mplayer, my HDTV flashes and seems to take about 2 seconds to change its mode before playing the video perfectly. The same sluggish “mode change” effect happens when I quit the video. The “mode change” effect is an annoying mystery: because before during and after video play my HDTV shows 1080p in the upper left corner. I have tried -noaspect, etc on mplayer to no effect. Any suggestions? Could you please post your xorg.conf file for the LT46131.

– Thanks

By: Joao Barbosa

Joao Barbosa — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:40:42 +0000

Great article!

I would like to know your thoughts about the performance of a linux box with two vga outputs configured as an extended screen playing 20-30 HD videos at the same time.

By: Lithium17

Lithium17 — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:22:15 +0000

Thanx for the article. As a Linux greenhorn (OSX user), I found it extremely useful.

I’m actually running Hardy-32bit on my lil sister’s old Acer laptop (AMD Turion 2.2ghz) using Wubi at the moment. A few minor issues, but I got MPlayer to play most of my videos…audio seems to stutter after long hours of playback (some say it’s a PulseAudio issue) but other than that, no problems so far. 576p/720p h.264 runs great….not tried any 1080p yet.

Will be building a Linux HTPC soon.

Cheerz!

By: gnarly

gnarly — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:37:31 +0000

Excellent summary and comments

I’d like to point out libavcodec (used in mplayer) is getting much better at HDTV H.264 with recent optimisations checked in the last month. Build an up to date mplayer from SVN and try it on a 3GHz Core2.

I can play BBC HD (H.264) on mplayer using an E8400 stock frequency, and have the option of deinterlacing (“-vf yadif”) too. I only need the “-lavdopts skiploopfilter=all” speedup when deinterlacing. My display is set to the correct resolution 1440×1080 to avoid any scaling.

With a working software player for HD H.264, Linux suddenly becomes a viable HTPC platform and there is no dependence on special h/w optimisations which are likely to be a way off.

I hope the performance of open source software like mplayer will continue to improve and start to make real use of threading etc. Thanks to all the people that are contributing to this effort.