x264 playback woes, xine and mplayer

[Toby]

Ok, first, let me preface that all my media is in mkv/x264 format, SD/720p/1080p. 4TB of my own DVD/HDDVD/BD rips. This comes from my previous mythtv setup, which used mplayer.

Using xine (the default behavior) these files are nigh unwatchable, green blocks on the left side of the screen, audio cut outs/sync issues. I gather from web searches that this is just a problem inherent in xine (and hasn't been addressed in the nearly 2 years it's been known about).

Then, much to my relief, I came across some mentions on mplayer replacing xine in lmce. I misunderstood at first, and have come to realize that it's only for Blu Ray and HDDVD playback. I did some experimenting, it seems that setting the subtype to "HD 720" or "HD 1080" doesn't matter, and still launches xine as long as the type is still "LinuxMCE Video File". But if you change the type to "LinuxMCE Blu-Ray Disc" or "LinuxMCE HD-DVD", mplayer opens (HURRAY!), and promptly crashes (D'oh). The crash log is identical to the one here.  Then, for some completely unknown reason, I decided to rename an *.mkv file to *.m2ts, which actually allows lmce to correctly launch mplayer and play the file. PERFECT!! Or not...

Fast forward/Reverse/Skip forward/Skip back all crash the player outright (only relevant line in the mplayer log that I can see is: [format] Sample format big-endian AC3 not yet supported ). Pause/Resume bring up the standard lmce timescale OSD (not sure what the name of that thing is), but completely blacks out the video and doesn't actually pause anything (the audio continues at least). Pressing play gets rid of the timescale OSD, but the video is still black (and audio still continues like nothing ever happened).

Is there a known fix for any of this mess possibly? Is the mplayer DCE device just in early development still? I've been struggling with it for the past couple of weeks, and so far I've got to the point where I have to rename all my files and not pause, fast forward or rewind  . Still... It's a much better interface than mythtv for non myth media  .

[tschak909]

Currently the mplayer_player device is still very new..and is hard-coded at the xine plugin to play EVO and M2TS files, as well as folders that have been tagged as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (for individual full disc rips taking up a single folder). It cannot be used in any other capacity currently without some major plumbing being done.

-Thom

[padrino]

Currently the mplayer_player device is still very new..and is hard-coded at the xine plugin to play EVO and M2TS files, as well as folders that have been tagged as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (for individual full disc rips taking up a single folder). It cannot be used in any other capacity currently without some major plumbing being done.

I probably misunderstood how DCE priorities work but I thought that since MPlayer is exposed via DCE it can be set to pickup the commands before Xine and allow those of us that want to experiment to do so. Assuming I read the documentation on DCE and how messages are routed correctly shouldn't there be a way to set it to a higher priority outside of Xine passing it off?

[tschak909]

No. read the code for Xine_Plugin.cpp ... as well as Media_Plugin.cpp ... right now, if you look at xine_plugin, there is literally a hard match for certain file extensions, and if they match, the message going to the xine player is hijacked, and resent to mplayer_player.

-Thom