HEVC codec videos

Note quite the same setup; but on an over clocked 900/450/450 Raspberry Pi 2 running Rasbian Jessie and with Gnome MPlayer: the 480p runs fine (although there is a little bit of wobble in the audio, but I've only just got that working). The 720p is dropping a couple of frames in places, but is still watcbable. It is working all 4 cores pretty hard.

---druck

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OK, thanks. I'm surprised that you were able to run that with mplayer at all on the Pi. I understood that the mplayer for the Pi didn't have any hardware acceleration and was incapable of playing, say, 1080p h.264 video as a result. I hadn't heard that the situation had changed. OSMC, on the other hand, does have hardware acceleration, and has no problems with 1080p h.264 video.

On 04/07/2015 19:23, Dave Farrance wrote:> OK, thanks. I'm surprised that you were able to run that with mplayer

I've not managed to get anywhere with OSMC, I tried it when I burnt a noobs card for the Pi2, but couldn't seem to get it do anything useful. I do have a Pi2 image of Kodi, which I can try out, I assume that will have the acceleration.

---druck

The original Pi A/B/A+/B+ were too underpowered to cope with any decent playback of video without the hardware acceleration. Each of the four cores of the Pi 2B CPU are more powerful than the single core in the Pi

1 series and together can, as has been shown above, just about cope with HD video in software alone.

There is no hardware decoder for h.265 on any Pi.

There is a selfcontained image for OSMC that you just copy to a card and it works. (it installs itself when you first boot it)

The AVC (h.264) decoder certainly makes AVC the codec of choice for use with the Pi, but the rescaling of the video for output to the screen is also a significant overhead that can be offloaded to the GPU if the necessary driver is present.

Thus, for example, OSMC on the Pi1 can play a 480p VP8-codec video with no problems even though it can't decode VP8 in hardware, but Mplayer on Raspbian goes dead slow because it has no GPU driver.

VP8 video 480p 33s 4.3MB

So I was wondering if OSMC on the Pi2 might be able to handle HD without hardware-decoding because of the extra CPU power and the GPU driver to handle the output-rescaling.

Got a bit further with the first release version because I had a keyboard connected this time - the mouse support is atrocious! Not keen on the interface in other respects either, so it looks like I'll be sticking with OpenElec for some time to come.

But in any case both OSMC and OpenElec play the H265 videos with acceleration, the 480p perfectly, the 720p with only a slight stutter in the initial zooming shot. In both cases the sound is played correctly unlike with the unaccelarated mPlayer, which garbles.

I am surprised there isn't a much greater difference in the video with acceleration though.

---druck

OK, thanks. Most of the HEVC videos that I've seen on the net were HD, so it looks like the Pi2 isn't quite there yet. Maybe there's room to improve the codec a bit. AVC software codecs improved with time, so maybe HEVC will too.

I don't like the default OSMC skin either, so I've switched it to the Kodi default "Confluence", although I'm told there are better skins, but yes, that seems to speed up the responsiveness. I prefer OSMC for Kodi because like Raspbmc, it still seems to be Debian based, and there are a few configuration changes that I like to make to the underlying OS.

In the absence of a hardware HEVC decoder, the acceleration only handles the final rescaling and "blitting" to the screen, so the speedup would be less than AVC's speedup.