Posts by jinx

I was an Nvidia user for 10+ years. About a year ago I switched to Intel NUC and I will NEVER go back. The level of official support blows Nvidia out of the water.

How are NTSC users supposed to use this? Almost all of our live tv is interlaced. This is the case for all of NA and SA. I think Japan as well.

Does someone know why the IVTC options were removed?

Quote from seahawk1986

The vpp_support branch of https://github.com/pesintta/vdr-plugin-softhddevice probably the most current version be (HEVC + VPP support VDPAU also works). Except for the Merge for hardware acceleration of the OSD with VDPAU that is in softhddevice-open glosd, everything should be in there, what is there accrued in the meantime.

I agree with this. I forked vpp_support and added Louis's VDPAU openglosd support to it. I started adding in gles2 (from rella) as well but I have no device to test so I stopped.

Quote from seahawk1986

If you want to have everything in a directory, you can see the option to use ONDEDIR ( https://projects.vdr-developer.org/git/vdr.git/tree/INSTALL#n378 et seq.), So you can plug but no more compile sense out of tree.

ONEDIR + LCLBLD is a great combo. Makes it very easy for backup purposes.

Quote from Fourty2

Das einzige, was mir im VDR noch fehlt, ist eine Art Playliste (gab es ja schonmal als Plugin), mit der man eine Serie am Stück, oder die (geschnittenen) Musikvideo eines Verzeichnisses in Zufallsreihenfolge (endlos) wiedergeben könnte (aka MTV Ersatz).

I use the mplayer plugin to playback media with mpv. I replaced "mplayer.sh" with my own script that does exactly what you said (and more for that matter) - supports playlists & shuffle playlists of any pictures/music/music videos/etc, play entire series or seasons of tv shows, shuffle play entire series or seasons of tv shows. It was quite easy to do.

I prefer VDR with vdr-mplayer/vdr-iptv over something like Kodi because of its' simplicity, stability, and being lightweight. Hopefully VDR will get a Netflix and Amazon Prime plugin. VDR might not have as `pretty` of a media librarian (plugin) that Kodi has, but it also doesn't have to muck about with SQL databases either. People have a tendency to cram absolutely everything into SQL databases making them bloated, slow, and a pain in the ass to rebuild if they get corrupted. From what I've heard Kodi suffers from this by dumping things into its' database that don't really belong there and would be much more efficient/fast by getting rid of that bad habit. To me it's a red flag when all my `Kodi friends` recommend storing its database on an SSD and having a current backup of it just in case. With VDR that's a non-issue.

Quote from speed

Me too makes the development around the VDR very sad.

I'm going for over 12 years.

But unfortunately, I have to admit, the VDR many lack what is needed today.

Google translator completely butchered this thread but I (think) I agree. The good news is Klaus is actively developing VDR again and addressing the need to modernize it. I know people who left for Kodi but are excited to come back to VDR once it's makeover is ready. Don't give up hope!

I haven't done a git-bisect yet to find which commit fixes the problem but I've switched all my VDR boxes over to the pesintta fork now and so far everything is fine. I didn't realize how many different forks there were (vpp, openglosd, gles, hevc, etc). It would be great if instead of all these forks, we had one main branch with all support in one and you select what you need in the Makefile/config settings. But, unfortunately that seems unlikely.

Quote from mighty-p

On my VDR1, I use Johns' original softhddevice with vdpau output (amd/ati). Here, I see the choppy display that you describe. However, on my VDR2 where I use the pesitta fork and va-api (intel), display seems to be OK. I am not sure if the difference is because of vdpau vs vaapi or because of the different softhddevice forks. It might be worth giving the pesintta fork a try.

Thank you for testing! I tried the pesintta fork you linked and playback is ok so there is definitely something different between the two. I'm going to do more investigating and hopefully will come up with more info.

Sample link is here.

Google translator is crap so I apologize if this isn't what you're looking for.. If you're just trying to verify that a file has both a video stream and audio stream, you can do that with:

fname=/path/to/some/file.mkv

for i in audio video; do
    [[ $(ffprobe -v quiet -of flat -show_streams "$fname" |grep -oE "codec_type=\"$i\"") ]] || { echo "ERROR: $i stream missing in $fname!"; exit 1; }
done

To check if the file plays ok, you can just play X seconds at Y location and check the player log to see if it exited without error. I use mpv-player so in my case I could do:

/usr/local/bin/mpv --no-cache --fullscreen --no-config --input-file=/dev/stdin --input-terminal=no -v --vo=vdpau --hwdec=vdpau --ao=alsa --audio-device=default --start=-10 "$fname" &>/logs/mpv.log

[[ $(grep 'finished playback, success' /logs/mpv.log) ]] || { echo "ERROR: $fname failed playback"; exit 1; }

That will play the last 10 seconds of the video and check the log for successful playback.

Quote from johns

The log is not so important, is the video smooth?

I have a very simple renderer it outputs a frame every 1/50s or 1/60s which depends on your display rate. When the video is too slow, i show the last frame twice, if the video is to fast i skip frames. When i look into the log, it looks good, it just renders the video without any duplications or drops.

Johns

Setting 60Hz didn't make any difference, the video playback still has the same problem. Have you downloaded the sample and checked it locally? I don't mind using mpv-player to watch recordings but unfortunately that doesn't help live tv being unwatchable.

I forced my refresh rate to 60Hz:

~$ sudo xrandr --display :0

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384

DVI-I-0 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

DVI-I-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

HDMI-0 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 698mm x 392mm

1920x1080 60.00*+ 59.94 23.97 60.05 60.00

1280x720 60.00 59.94

720x480 59.94

640x480 59.94 59.93

I created a new log and attached it.

Just for reference, my softhddevice/Makefile has:

CONFIG += -DDEBUG
#-DOSD_DEBUG # enable debug output+functions

#CONFIG += -DSTILL_DEBUG=2 # still picture debug verbose level

#CONFIG += -DAV_INFO -DAV_INFO_TIME=3000 # info/debug a/v sync

CONFIG += -DUSE_PIP # PIP support

CONFIG += -DHAVE_PTHREAD_NAME # supports new pthread_setname_np

#CONFIG += -DNO_TS_AUDIO # disable ts audio parser

#CONFIG += -DUSE_TS_VIDEO # build new ts video parser

CONFIG += -DUSE_MPEG_COMPLETE # support only complete mpeg packets

CONFIG += -DH264_EOS_TRICKSPEED # insert seq end packets for trickspeed

#CONDIF + = -DDUMP_TRICKSPEED # dump packets trickspeed

#CONFIG += -DUSE_BITMAP # VDPAU, use bitmap surface for OSD

CONFIG + = -DUSE_VDR_SPU SPU # use VDR decoder.

#CONFIG += -DUSE_SOFTLIMIT # (tobe removed) limit the buffer fill

And last, if I understand correctly, this can't be fixed without adding some feature to the softhddevice renderer? Is it possible to just look at what mpv does in this case and copy it since it plays fine in mpv? Or are renderers vastly different? It seems like playing mpeg2 video would be standard..? This makes watching live tv impossible on many channels here.

Quote from johns

Also wenn ich es richtig sehe wird die PTS falsch berechnet oder falsch gesendet.

Code

2017.Aug.07|07:58:52 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.623 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.673 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.707 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.757 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.790 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.840 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.873 closing 0
2017.Aug.07|07:58:53 video: render frame pts 25:28:27.923 closing 0

623->673 = 50ms, 673->707 = 34ms, 707->757 = 50ms, 757->790 = 33ms, 790->840 = 50ms, 840->873 = 33ms, 873->923 = 50ms

Looks like some speedup source material. Its a 20Hz frame interleaved with a 30Hz frame.
I have no idea how to render this.

The decoder and rendering looks ok. But my frame render didn't support dynamic frequency changes.

I don't know if this is helpful but the framerate should be 29.97 FPS. I also tested the sample with mpv-player, which played it perfectly fine. I asked about this in #mpv-devel on Freenode and the reply I got was, "Don't expect anything from the input and just use the timestamps. That's what mpv follows. Broadcast can switch between soft telecine and actual interlacism. Same for DVDs. It just gets repeat field flags in that case usually".

Does this help any?

I made the above changes and played a short sample recording that really shows the problem. Attached is the resulting log. Please have a look when you get the chance.

Thanks!

Quote from johns

It can be a simple parsing error.
To find these failures, all debug information (mostly disabled in the source) must be enabled and then looked where the packages are lost.

F.e. dvb docs says only 3 0 are allowed, the stations encoder adds 4 or more 0 at these position.

Watching tv here has gotten really bad because of this problem so I'll try stumbling my way through it. A few more questions...

If I `grep -i "debug" *` I see some lines where debug is commented out, for example: softhddev.c: //Debug(3, "audio: pts %#012" PRIx64 "\n", AudioAvPkt->pts);
The same is true with `grep -i dsyslog *`. Do I want to uncomment every "//Debug" and "//dsyslog" in all files where they're commented out?

I start vdr with "--log=3". Do I need to adjust that at all?

To enable all the debugging I'll need, do I simple enable -DDEBUG in the softhddevice Makefile?

Is there anything specific I'm supposed to be looking for in the log? I assume enabling the debugging is going to spit out a bunch of technical info that will be like reading Chinese to me so I'm lost about where to even start.

Last question, will I need any other tools besides the log? Will I have to analyze the sample recording somehow to compare it with whatever debug info the logs contain? Totally lost here as well.

I greatly appreciate any patience & help trying to fix this!

I have no asound.conf but I do define ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.!default "hdmi:NVidia,1"

And I start softhddevice with only:

-d :0 -D -w ignore-repeat-pict

Audio-over-HDMI works great here. Additionally, my tv script automatically generates the correct ~/.asoundrc (by checking /proc/asound/card*/eld*) so I don't have to manually configure anything.

Quote from seahawk1986

Is your TV/Monitor set to a multiple of the video framerate (in this case 29.97 fps)? AFAIK there is no good pull-up/pull-down mechanism in softhddevice for framerate adaption.

I've never had to set any of my tvs to anything. They all play different framerates no problem. But I don't believe this is a frame rate problem anyways. If you check the sample I've provided, it looks like the issue is playing frames out of sequence. Maybe something due to timing, or a missing end-of-sequence flag in the headers, or whatever else, I dunno. Like I said though, this exact same problem existed in vdr-xine as well and Rnissl managed to fix it quickly within vdr-xine - it wasn't related to tv settings, video cards, video drivers, etc.

After looking in my past pm's with Johns, hd mpeg4 h264 had the same problem, which he fixed.

I use nvidia video cards and vdpau. I use Louis's fork of Johns official repo. Louis added support for an opengl-osd but that's all. The problem is present in the official repo as well, which I mentioned to Johns ages ago. I think we got busy with other fixes to softhdevice at the time and forgot about it.

I should mention that this problem existed in vdr-xine as well. Rnissl fixed it pretty quickly. If it's the same issue in softhddevice, which it looks like from a user perspective, I don't think it should be hard to figure out. It's been years now but IIRC it may have had something to do with bad pts timing...? Or possibly missing error-handling in case an error occurs in the stream.

Hi. I frequently experience jerky playback on all sd mpeg2 content when using softhddevice. It looks almost like the frame order is mixed up. I created a short sample recording which shows the problem. The sample plays fine with mpv in linux and mpc-hc in windows. It's only jerky when softhddevice is the decoder. If anyone can help fix this, the sample may be downloaded at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_0IZ_…jBDd21sT1E/view

Thanks for any help!