2010-11-09, 21:40
Hi,
I have following configuration:
- Intel Celeron 2.66 GHz
- NVidia GeForce 7300 SE
- 1 GB DDR RAM
- 1280x800 display
recently I've installed XBMC Dharma Beta 4 and I've tried to play H264, MKV, HD 720p videos. To my surprise the playback went choppy each time there was a little more action going on the screen. I tried to play with video settings, but without much luck. So I've did "apt-get install mplayer" and tried to play this file with MPlayer. But the video still didn't play smooth. I was a little confused, because my laptop with Celeron M 1.4GHz and integrated Intel i915GM chipset could play 720p almost smoothly, so I thought that above hardware would handle it without hassle.
And then idea came to my mind. I logged to my xbmc box through SSH (don't have keyboard there) and did:
1) /etc/init.d/xbmc-live stop
2) xinit &
3) DISPLAY=:0 mplayer -fs file.mkv
and suddenly I managed to get completely smooth video playback on my box, without single dropped frame. Hell, I even managed to play almost smoothly one of 1080p videos (but on other, 1280x1024 display). When I tried to play my file with MPlayer with XBMC in background, XBMC was just sitting there doing nothing - no video playback, image browsing, music etc., but I checked and it was eating ~25% of my CPU! Is this normal and expected?
I finally managed to get smooth playback with MPlayer and XBMC in background by doing "renice -n 19" on xbmc process. But it doesn't solve issue with XBMC itself, because when I'll do this it will also set priority 19 on movie player that XBMC will launch, so I will still get choppy playback while using XBMC.
Is there anyway around this? Anything I can do to reduce CPU intensiveness of XBMC or at least change priority of XBMC GUI itself, but not the movie player?
If there's need, I can provide any additional information, do some testing, etc. - just let me know (and possible also tell how to get information you're interested in).
I have following configuration:
- Intel Celeron 2.66 GHz
- NVidia GeForce 7300 SE
- 1 GB DDR RAM
- 1280x800 display
recently I've installed XBMC Dharma Beta 4 and I've tried to play H264, MKV, HD 720p videos. To my surprise the playback went choppy each time there was a little more action going on the screen. I tried to play with video settings, but without much luck. So I've did "apt-get install mplayer" and tried to play this file with MPlayer. But the video still didn't play smooth. I was a little confused, because my laptop with Celeron M 1.4GHz and integrated Intel i915GM chipset could play 720p almost smoothly, so I thought that above hardware would handle it without hassle.
And then idea came to my mind. I logged to my xbmc box through SSH (don't have keyboard there) and did:
1) /etc/init.d/xbmc-live stop
2) xinit &
3) DISPLAY=:0 mplayer -fs file.mkv
and suddenly I managed to get completely smooth video playback on my box, without single dropped frame. Hell, I even managed to play almost smoothly one of 1080p videos (but on other, 1280x1024 display). When I tried to play my file with MPlayer with XBMC in background, XBMC was just sitting there doing nothing - no video playback, image browsing, music etc., but I checked and it was eating ~25% of my CPU! Is this normal and expected?
I finally managed to get smooth playback with MPlayer and XBMC in background by doing "renice -n 19" on xbmc process. But it doesn't solve issue with XBMC itself, because when I'll do this it will also set priority 19 on movie player that XBMC will launch, so I will still get choppy playback while using XBMC.
Is there anyway around this? Anything I can do to reduce CPU intensiveness of XBMC or at least change priority of XBMC GUI itself, but not the movie player?
If there's need, I can provide any additional information, do some testing, etc. - just let me know (and possible also tell how to get information you're interested in).
