MPEG-4 videos: not playing properly with Slitaz5 32-bit

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MPEG-4 videos: not playing properly with Slitaz5 32-bit

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Started 4 years ago by Anonymous
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Anonymous

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MPEG-4 videos/films are not playing properly with Slitaz5 32-bit, and have tried the following video players without success on a Samsung N145 10" netbook:

1. vlc 3.0.6 - will not launch from 'Applications/Multimedia'
2. smplayer 19.10.0 - sound & video out of sync, plays in slow-motion
3. gnome-mplayer 1.0.3.(the one preinstalled with Slitaz5) - sound & video out of sync, plays in slow motion

Though the Samsung N145 is low-powered machine (dual-threaded single CPU @ 1.66GHz; 2GB RAM), it does play videos without any difficulty with other distros that I've tried, e.g. Manjaro 18 (64-bit) ...

I would appreciate any help with this - many thanks in advance

Posted 4 years ago #
mojo

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The menu shortcut doesn't work for Vlc because it has no graphical user interface.
Slitaz-5.0 doesn't support Qt5 which is required to build the graphical user interface plugin of Vlc-3.
Vlc-3 can be used from the command line if you have the desire to learn how.

The playback is slow on the mplayer based programs because GPU modeset direct-rendering is not working on your computer. The packages to do this are not installed by default as they are on other distributions to keep the slitaz iso size as small as possible.

Required packages for intel gpu at the minimum are linux-drm libdrm-intel mesa-dri-intel xorg-xf86-video-intel.
Install mesa-demos for glxinfo and glxgears to verify direct-rendering.
After rebooting check for direct-rendering by entering these commands in terminal:
glxgears
Glxgears window should open without error with 60 FPS+ , the CPU indicator graph in lxpanel next to the clock should barely rise. The CPU indicator showing heavy load is bad due to slow software rendering off-loading graphics rendering onto the CPU.
glxinfo | grep rendering
Good output is direct rendering: Yes
If direct-rendering fails problem solving involves checking /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/messages for errors.

Posted 4 years ago #
Anonymous

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Hi mojo, many thanks for the above advice :-)
I downloaded all the files you suggested. Glxgears shows 59fps, and direct rendering = yes on this single core Atom netbook. In view of what you said about a lack of support in Slitaz for Qt5, I've now abandoned VLC player.

Also good news that I was able to get 'gnome-player' to work: acceptable quality playback with synchronisation of audio & video. However, to do this I had to use the 'handbrake' app (available in Ubuntu but not in Slitaz), to modify the video file: frame-rate was reduced from 50 to 25fps, and the bitrate reduced to 1500kbps. A higher bitrate (2500), and an fps of either 50 or 25, gave a choppy and therefore unviewable playback quality. So therefore I'll use 'gnome-player', as this seems to be the only video player that works with my setup, following some video file manipulation.

Just for the record: when I clicked on SMplayer and selected the 25fps/1500 kbps file, I got the following notification: "mplayer/mpv has finished unexpectedly. Exit code: 127"

I'm going to mark this post as "solved", as I am now able to view videos on the netbook with Slitaz5, albeit following some file manipulation with 'handbrake', and using 'gnome-player' to watch them.

PS. Request: could we have 'handbrake' in the Slitaz packages ? It would be very useful for manipulating HD video files, thereby making them playable on old/low-powered hardware....

Posted 4 years ago #

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