How to play DVD Movies on X1000

AmigaOne X1000 platform specific issues.
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amigasociety
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by amigasociety »

One thing that surprises me, that while playing a DVD, and I launch say OWB-MUI to browse the net, the video starts playing slow motion or choppy. I have always expected video playback on the Amiga OS to be seemless. As I let the movie play it seems to get back on track but still, stimmys and stops would happen as I clicked on websites, etc...

TJ
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by Slayer »

It's probably a clash of task priorities

If memory serves me right it's from 127 to -127

Most tasks probably start at 0 so if you have 2 tasks and they are reasonably cpu intensive then they fight for the use of it on equal footing

Perhaps set DvPlayer to 1 or even 5 and then the browser would stay at 0 (this gives DvPlayer cpu preference and the browser would only pick up and operate with spare cpu cycles - still adequate just there are specific rules now and DvPlayer won't have to wrestle for it anymore)

I'm not sure what the tooltype is and I'm at work on an i7 Laptop LOL

but try the following tooltype in the DvPlayer icon information and see how you go?

ChangeTaskPri=5

maybe someone else can verfiy the tooltype if that doesn't work, I'm trying to think if we have a task manager but this would only be active on a running task and once you closed it (finished your DVD and closed DvPlayer) it will lose the adjustment and you'd need to set it each time so tooltypes is probably the better option, always on!
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by ChrisH »

amigasociety wrote:One thing that surprises me, that while playing a DVD, and I launch say OWB-MUI to browse the net, the video starts playing slow motion or choppy
Please remember that the RadeonHD drivers are still not completely optimised. I believe that rendering videos is currently quite CPU intensive, but at some point that will presumably be fixed. Steve Jones mentions this (mostly in relation to HD video playback) in his X1000 demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXEd50DUns0
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by AmigaDave »

ChrisH wrote:
amigasociety wrote:One thing that surprises me, that while playing a DVD, and I launch say OWB-MUI to browse the net, the video starts playing slow motion or choppy
Please remember that the RadeonHD drivers are still not completely optimised. I believe that rendering videos is currently quite CPU intensive, but at some point that will presumably be fixed. Steve Jones mentions this (mostly in relation to HD video playback) in his X1000 demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXEd50DUns0
What about the demo videos of people running multiple videos in separate windows on an X1000? They appeared to make it look easy to watch three different movies at the same time in separate windows on your X1000 while still doing other work on it. Not that I want to try to do that, but you can see that demonstrating something like that could be very misleading to some people and it would come back and bite who ever made such a demonstration video.

There might be some occasion that I would want to run some video, or a movie on my X1000, but most of the time I am sure I will just put a DVD, or BluRay disc into my Sony video player, if I want to watch a movie. It would be good to know exactly what our X1000's are capable of doing though, so we can promote them properly to other interested Amiga users. I understand the statement that better video card drivers are in the works and will make a huge difference in the future when they are completed. That fact brings to light my concern and curiosity on how we can recruit more developers, so progress can occur faster, both for the OS4.x itself, and with more third party software written and/or ported from existing Open Source code.
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by ChrisH »

AmigaDave wrote:What about the demo videos of people running multiple videos in separate windows on an X1000? They appeared to make it look easy to watch three different movies at the same time in separate windows on your X1000 while still doing other work on it. Not that I want to try to do that, but you can see that demonstrating something like that could be very misleading to some people and it would come back and bite who ever made such a demonstration video.
What X1000 owners show their machine doing is entirely their responsibility, and not something we can control. I believe that Steve Jones went to great lengths in his video to explain that he couldn't get HD videos running smoothly, due to the current RadeonHD drivers. That the current drivers ARE capable of running multiple SD videos simultaneously is still pretty impressive IMHO :-)

(Remember that HD videos usually use advanced codecs which require much more CPU power to decode, and so will need more CPU power than SD videos - even after accounting for the extra pixels being displayed.)
Last edited by ChrisH on Fri Feb 24, 2012 11:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by amigasociety »

Could the issue be that those videos of people playing multiple videos at the same time are not doing DVD obviously but instead playing avi files or some other file format that Amiga OS 4.1u5 seems to handle better than an actual DVD like I was doing?

tj
ChrisH wrote:
AmigaDave wrote:What about the demo videos of people running multiple videos in separate windows on an X1000? They appeared to make it look easy to watch three different movies at the same time in separate windows on your X1000 while still doing other work on it. Not that I want to try to do that, but you can see that demonstrating something like that could be very misleading to some people and it would come back and bite who ever made such a demonstration video.
What X1000 owners show their machine doing is entirely their responsibility, and not something we can control. I believe that Steve Jones went to great lengths in his video to explain that he couldn't get HD videos running smoothly, due to the current RadeonHD drivers. That the current drivers ARE capable of running multiple SD videos simultaneously is still pretty impressive IMHO :-)

(Remember that HD videos usually use advanced codecs which require much more CPU power to decode, and so will need more CPU power than SD videos - even after accounting for the extra pixels being displayed.)
It would be good to know exactly what our X1000's are capable of doing though, so we can promote them properly to other interested Amiga users.
I do have my own worries on whether or not AmigaKit/A-Eon/etc are doing enough to explain exactly what First Contact X1000's are *currently* capable of (and what they aren't), but there is also a limit on how much you can expect them to do. A-Eon has let the X1000 be demoed at shows & even some Amiga clubs, at which people are usually allowed to try them out & run almost anything they want on them (and then report that on Amiga forums). I imagine Amiga Future will have been allowed to review one? And there is nothing to stop people asking on Amiga forums about the X1000...

Given that First Contact systems are (I think) aimed to hard-core "early adopter" Amiga enthusiasts, I don't think it's unreasonable for A-Eon & AmigaKit to expect that buyers will have some idea of what AmigaOS4 can & can't do, and to have done some research about the X1000 before forking-out approximately 2 grand! I am assuming that later "non-First Contact" X1000s will be more feature complete, so that issues like unfinished drivers will hopefully not exist, and thus there will be less worry about the buyer needing to know exactly what they are getting.
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by Antique »

720p videos does run nicely with mplayer.
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by Hans »

amigasociety wrote:One thing that surprises me, that while playing a DVD, and I launch say OWB-MUI to browse the net, the video starts playing slow motion or choppy. I have always expected video playback on the Amiga OS to be seemless. As I let the movie play it seems to get back on track but still, stimmys and stops would happen as I clicked on websites, etc...

TJ
I have no idea if it is the cause of the choppy playback in your case, but quite a lot of DVD drives are badly made, or released before their firmware is fully tested. With my A1-XE, video playback was fine until I bought a new DVD driver. With the new DVD drive, encrypted DVDs would be choppy, even though no other applications were running, and CPU usage was below 50%. Ripping the DVD, and playing back the resulting file resulted in smooth playback. Conclusion: my new DVD drive was substandard.

Some DVD drive manufacturers release firmware updates months after shipping their drives. These fix bugs, and sometimes unlock new features that weren't ready earlier. Unfortunately, these tend to come in the form of a Windows executable, and so you'll need a Windows PC to update the drive.

Maybe these problematic drives could be made to play smoothly with software trickery, but I'll leave that up to the developers of the video players to decide/figure-out.

Hans
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by trevordick »

I have 2 DVD drives in my A1-X1000 and Just for fun while testing another Debian Squeeze installation I ran 2 commercial DVD's at the same time while browsing the web.

Both DVD played, admittedly with some frame dropping, but I was still quite surprised it worked.

Trevor

ps both drives are the ones used in the "First Contact" systems.
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Re: How to play DVD Movies on X1000

Post by ChrisH »

amigasociety wrote:Could the issue be that those videos of people playing multiple videos at the same time are not doing DVD obviously but instead playing avi files or some other file format that Amiga OS 4.1u5 seems to handle better than an actual DVD like I was doing?
Prompted by Trevor, I gave a quick test of a DVD while OWB was already running, and I didn't notice any problems. I also quit & then restarted OWB, and barely noticed any juddering at all (and only for a brief moment) while sound continued to play perfectly.

Caveats: My DVD drive is not what First Contact systems have, although that shouldn't make any difference. The DVD I was using was probably not a demanding Anamorphic one (like most modern films will be). My OWB starts without showing any web site... but if it had started loading a big JavaScript heavy one, then I might well have seen more & longer juddering (due to bigger & longer CPU demand by OWB).
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