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Upgrade system to watch 1080p movies (improve graphical performance)?

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  • Upgrade system to watch 1080p movies (improve graphical performance)?

    Hi,

    2 year ago I bought a PC (received some advise here ), and it fullfilled my requiremets (mainly watch movies, I don't play games really) with no problems till now that I started watching lots of HD movies, and also changed the LCD (Samsung LN37A450 37" working @ 1360x768px through HDMI cable) to a LED TV:

    Samsung UN46D6500 46-Inch 1080p 120HZ 3D LED TV, which looks great, but sometimes I'm having some issues.

    When I'm reproducing some HD videos it produces some horizontal lines (on the lower third of the screen mainly), like it isn't able to refresh as fast as the image/video goes... below the line it seems to be a fraction delayed some times (that's what I'm imagining is happening). It happens mainly on fast scenes, or after the image changes completely (ie if it is a slow panning on a landscape, it has no problem).

    I made the test of lowering the display on the Nvidia X Server settings to 720p, but I still have the same issues (actually when I reproduced HD movies on my previous 720p LCD I also had the issue but I think it was less clear, maybe the bigger screen makes more obvious the artifact). I'm still having the output through a HDMI cable.

    I'm currently running Lubuntu 11.10 with Nvidia recommended propietary drivers.

    So the question is: considering my current system, where do you think is the bottle neck... and how I could probable solve this issue without having to buy a complete new pc.

    My system:

    ASUS P5Q - Intel? P45 / ICH10R
    CPU INTEL CORE 2 DUO E8500 - 3.16 GHZ 1333 MHZ DUAL CORE BOX
    MSI V146-09S GEFORCE N9800GT T2D512-OC PCIE 16X DX10 512MB
    RAM Corsair XMS2 DDR2 2Gb (2x1Gb) PC6400C4DHX
    Samsung UN46D6500 46-Inch 1080p 120HZ 3D LED TV @1080p through HDMI cable
    Seagate Barracuda ST32000542AS SATA 3Gb/s 2TB 5900 2TB Hard Drive
    HDD 500 gb sata2 western digital 7200rpm
    TOPOWER M2 600W ATX 12V2.0 20+4 PINES BLACK
    Antec Three Hundred Case

    Thanks in advance!
    Mguel

    PS: posted on graphics card since my first thought was to buy a new graphic card, but maybe the bottle neck is elsewhere (RAM?). What do you think?

  • #2
    Something I forgot.

    I'm running 32 bit lubuntu 11.10... don't know if installing 32 bit would make any difference, and it would imply lots of work backing up things, reinstalling and recostumizing.

    Maybe another option would be to overclock the GPU?

    Comment


    • #3
      First of all you forgot the most important thing: what card is it?!

      Comment


      • #4
        It is there (after MoBo and CPU):
        Msi v146-09s geforce n9800gt t2d512-oc pcie 16x dx10 512mb

        Comment


        • #5
          So used right it you could use xbmc with vdpau or mplayer2 with vdpau. do you use a ppa for 290.06 drivers?

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Kano View Post
            So used right it you could use xbmc with vdpau or mplayer2 with vdpau. do you use a ppa for 290.06 drivers?
            I use VLC as media player, and no, I use the recommended propietary nvidia drivers from ubuntu repositories, not the ppa ones... I'm not at home right now to tell you the exact version.

            Comment


            • #7
              vlc has absolutely no direct vdpau acc. and the vdpau-video wrapper is crap too and most likely unused even if you turn hw accelleration on due to multithreaded ffmpeg/libav). best is mplayer2 using this as ~/.mplayer/config:
              Code:
              vo=vdpau
              vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,
              xbmc has an easy menu option to turn on vdpau accelleration. get rid of vlc and it should be fine.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Kano View Post
                vlc has absolutely no direct vdpau acc. and the vdpau-video wrapper is crap too and most likely unused even if you turn hw accelleration on due to multithreaded ffmpeg/libav). best is mplayer2 using this as ~/.mplayer/config:
                Code:
                vo=vdpau
                vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,
                xbmc has an easy menu option to turn on vdpau accelleration. get rid of vlc and it should be fine.
                GREAT!!!

                I'll test it in a couple of hours and I'll let you know the results, and will update the driver to the ppa one.

                Thanks!

                Comment


                • #9
                  ok using mplayer (smplayer) the "lines" I described don't appear... I added the lines to mplayer config and also updated nvidia drivers to 290.06 through xorg-edgers ppa and things look even better now.

                  Thanks a lot!!! so no need to upgrade hardware... nice!

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Kano View Post
                    ... best is mplayer2 using this as ~/.mplayer/config:
                    Code:
                    vo=vdpau
                    vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,
                    ....

                    Note: what I describe next probably has to do with smplayer issues using vdpau for divx/xvid files... jump to the end to see how I finally managed to have smplayer reproduce them using vdpau (I don't like Gnome Player GUI, especially settings keyboard shortcuts)


                    Shortly after my last post I noticed that I added vo and vc lines at the end of config (after [gnome-mplayer] section), so moved them to the [default] section, and smplayer didn't play avi files (the video area was simply black, no audio neither).

                    If I changed settings on smplayer to use xv instead of vdpau, with both config lines vo= and vc= I could play avi, but not mkv (again black screen).

                    And if I used xv, and deleted vo= and vc= lines, then I could play all video formats.

                    The output of video using xv vs vdpau seems the same (to my eye, no artifacts like I still have if I play video with vlc, or with online flash HD movies), but there is a noticeable (and expected) more use of cpu when using xv (30-40% cpu vs 10%, with an idle cpu usage of 6-7%).


                    I found xvid+vdpau issues mentioned. I tried adding ffodivxvdpau but it didn't work.

                    Then I realized that if I used Gnome Player of mplayer2 directly with no front end, both reproduced avi's and mkv's... but in this couple of days I have come to like smplayer GUI and preferences so continued searching:

                    And finally how I made smplayer reproduce avi and mkv using vdpau:

                    reinstalled mplayer (instead of mplayer2) and added to /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf

                    Code:
                    [vo.vdpau]
                    vc=ffmpeg12vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffh264vdpau,
                    (with mplayer2 it didn't work on smplayer)

                    Cheers,
                    Mguel

                    PS: curentrly using mplayer 2:1.0~rc4.dfsg1+svn33713-1 and 290.06 nvidia driver.
                    PSS: I can't reproduce correctly mts (AVCHD lite) files (from Lumix camera) with vdpau, but for that I can use vlc (I usually convert them to other format so no big problem)

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