[davidmtml]

Hi all,

I don't post much here, but read every day...so thank you all for being such a great community!

I'm trying to play Planet Earth from my Pi, but just get audio, and no video. Videos work fine from my PC on XBMC, but not on my Pi. Here is the screenshot of MediaInfo for these files.



I'm not very familiar with the "AVC" codec, but I have other files that use it that play just fine, such as this. Both are AVC, but just different versions




Thanks everybody!

[popcornmix]

We only claim to play up to Blu-Ray (level 4.1) profile H.264.
Your first file is 5.1 with 16 reference frames. That is insane and requires lots of memory to decode. (does it really need better than Blu-Ray quality?)

I would suspect that if you wind up gpu_mem high enough, then the file will probably play.
If you have a 512M Pi, then set gpu_mem=256 in config.txt and reboot. Any better?

In future don't encode files about level 4.1 or you'll have difficulty playing them on low powered devices.

[davidmtml]

We only claim to play up to Blu-Ray (level 4.1) profile H.264.
Your first file is 5.1 with 16 reference frames. That is insane and requires lots of memory to decode. (does it really need better than Blu-Ray quality?)

I most certainly do not haha!!

I would suspect that if you wind up gpu_mem high enough, then the file will probably play.
If you have a 512M Pi, then set gpu_mem=256 in config.txt and reboot. Any better?

In future don't encode files about level 4.1 or you'll have difficulty playing them on low powered devices.

Thanks Popcornmix!

[DBMandrake]

After reading this thread yesterday I was playing with a number of high bit rate files today to see just how high the Pi could go...including these Jellyfish test files:

http://jell.yfish.us/

The result was that with the files on the SD card I could play up to 70 Mbit/sec level 5.0 flawlessly ! Very impressed by that as its well in excess of the Blu-Ray spec particularly the bit rate, and my Mac Mini (2007 - software decoding) can't even manage more than about 15Mbit/sec. (Not that I'm advocating 70Mbit/sec - that's insanely high!)

With 80 Mbit/sec it would play ok for a few seconds then intermittently pause - I got the impression the bottleneck might be reading the file from the SD card and feeding it to the GPU rather than a GPU decoding limitation. (arm cpu utilisation was still under 50% too)

Its easy to be critical of the speed of the arm processor in the Pi but I don't think people realise just how powerful the GPU is for such a low power consumption low cost device...