Revision as of 21:50, 19 April 2009

Playback of HD content - User Reports

This page is for playback reports regarding High Definition Content. This page will serve as a resource for users in selecting hardware for their MythTV systems.

h.264 samples of various resolutions that are often difficult to play can be found at http://x264.nl/h.264.samples/. Find the file that is most taxing to play while still playing smoothly and run the script on this page with it.

To remove all filtering and turn on any available multithreaded playback, use the following mplayer line:

mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv -monitoraspect 16:9 -lavdopts threads=2:fast:skiploopfilter=all -sws 0 %s

How to produce information for this page

Paste the following into a file (eg, hdplayback.sh), chmod +x the file, and run it on a file known to play back perfectly on a given system (eg, ./hdplayback.sh moviefile.mkv). It will produce an output file called hdreport.txt. hdreport.txt is in wiki format. Edit this page, find the most suitable position in the table to place the data (by CPU spec), and paste the output there. Edit the "Comments" section to share any special command line needed to get the program to play smoothly.

This script requires ffmpeg to run properly. For Matroska files, mkvtoolnix is also required. Some types of files do not report accurate information. Check the output for missing fields and fill in as necessary.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Script to generate wiki formatted HD Playback report.  Only
# run this on files that play back smoothly!
#

CPUNAME=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name" | sed -e 's/model name\t: //' | head -n 1 | sed -e 's/\t/ /'`
CPUMHZ=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "cpu MHz" | sed -e 's/cpu MHz//' | sed 's/ *//g' | sed 's/\t*://' | head -n 1`
MEMTOTAL=`cat /proc/meminfo |grep MemTotal | sed 's/MemTotal//' | sed 's/ *//g' | sed 's/\t*://' | head -n 1`
KERNEL=`uname -r`
COMMENTS="No Comments."
RESOLUTION=`ffmpeg -i "$1" 2>&1 | grep Video | head -n 1 | awk '{ print $6 }' | sed -e 's/,//'`
FORMAT=`ffmpeg -i "$1" 2>&1 | grep Video | head -n 1 | awk '{ print $4 }' | sed -e 's/,//'`
BITRATE=`ffmpeg -i "$1" 2>&1 | grep bitrate: | awk '{ print $6 }'`
EXTENSION=`basename "$1" | awk -F . '{print $NF}' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`
if [ "$EXTENSION" = "mkv" ]; then {
	MKVSECONDS=`mkvinfo "$1" | grep Duration | awk '{ print $4}' | sed 's/s//' | awk -F . '{ print $1 }'`
	MKVSIZE=`mkvinfo "$1" | grep Segment, | awk '{ print $4}'` 
	MKVBITRATE="$[ ( ($MKVSIZE * 8) / ($MKVSECONDS ) / 1000 ) ]"
	BITRATE=$MKVBITRATE
	}
else echo "Not a Matroska File, continuing." 
fi
echo -n "Player used to watch video? (Mplayer, Xine, Internal, Other): "
read PLAYER

echo "|-" > hdreport.txt
echo "| $CPUNAME || $CPUMHZ MHz || $MEMTOTAL || $KERNEL || $FORMAT / $EXTENSION || $RESOLUTION || $BITRATE kb/s || $COMMENTS || $PLAYER" >> hdreport.txt
echo "|-" >> hdreport.txt

echo "Thank you!  Please paste the following into the wiki page at: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php?title=HD_Playback_Reports"
cat hdreport.txt

User Reported Data

Please include reports for MythTV only. Reports for mplayer, vlc or any other media player are unhelpful and belong in the wikis of the respective project.

Intel Processors

AMD Processors