Cannot play any 1280x720 dramas with any players

[sukida]

I did read the FAQ.

For a long time, I have noticed that certain video files truncate the right side or cause video players to crash or fail to play the file.

The following media players on linux fail to play any of these files: mplayer, totem, aviplay, codeine, ffplay, gxine, beep-media-player, helix-player, and vlc. I have no access to other players.

Now I know which files they are. It is only the ones that have 1280 width. More and more d-addicts files are that width now.

Hachi One Diver ep2 has two sizes and, according to the file command, the same format, but only the smaller size works.

I have tried all sorts of options to mplayer, including many -vo options, some -vf options, and -zoom,

Thanks.

[AkumaX]

need a faster computer ;)

[sukida]

I wondered if I should leave that last paragraph out....

[deadd]

I did read the FAQ.

My monitor has a width of fewer than 1280 pixels,

There's your answer. Of course that matters, not just because of the physical screen size, but the video card displaying whatever size your monitor is. Hardware and software incompatibility is at issue here. So, I recommend getting a bigger monitor that can handle 1280 width. Also, some older video cards may not be able to handle that size as well, so if you get a new monitor but your video card can't keep up, then you need a new video card.

Of course, as a previous post said, a new system (including a new monitor) is probably less of a hassle.

[AkumaX]

playing 1280x720 videos on a, say, 800x600 monitor isn't a problem - for Windows (and a decent computer) - it will just resize it to the playable area of around ~800x450

but you're running linux, you'll have to deal with drivers and installs and bins and tars...
i bid good luck to you

[sukida]

Interesting how both of you concluded that it is a hardware issue. I don't think it is. All video players perform scaling, else small monitors would never work. Consider how you can show a video in a small window. The size of the monitor is probably irrelevant. I only mentioned it for completeness.

When I play a d-addicts large video in a small window, it is -----> still truncated on the right <-----.

I just remembered that my monitor is 1280x1024 after all, so actually it is large enough. I will edit both of the comments that seem to have confused people out of my first post. Faster hardware will not solve the problem at all. My video card is a Matrox G550, and has no problem playing all files that I have thrown at it, except for d-addicts 1280x720 files (which I suspect is software).

Any other ideas? In particular, does anybody know mplayer settings well?

Thanks.

[amrayu]

Can you be a little bit more specific?
What do you mean by "fail"?

Plus what are the specs of your computer? Super old computers cannot handle big resolutions... they lag like crazy.

[AkumaX]

i see Hachi One Driver eps are using DivX6.xx, are your codecs updated?

sorry not much of a linux person (*paging ethidda*)

[NJunNuity]

Can you be a little bit more specific?
Plus what are the specs of your computer? Super old computers cannot handle big resolutions... they lag like crazy.

Specs were the first things to pop up in my mind also. My old computer couldn't play 1280x720 video files; they lagged just like amrayu said. I'd test this out on my Linux box if I had any 1280x720 files.

[sukida]

Hi Amrayu,

Sure.

"Fail" means that mplayer and vlc both play it normally, but truncate the right 20% or so of the image. totem segfaults.

I have a dual Athlon MP (1.2MHz each) with 1GB of pc2100 DDR memory. It plays videos normally except for this. A new computer is not in the cards for the near future.

The problem appears to be completely unrelated to system load or number of processors. It does not get worse with a higher load or running on only one processor and it does not get better with a lower load or running on both processors.

And, to test the hypothesis, if I increase the system load severely by running many other processes, other, smaller, video files do not have the problem. They just stutter and so on as you would expect they would. Only the 1280x720 files from d-addicts have the truncating problem.

Thanks.

[ethidda]

oooh, Linux! So I see you've tried most of the options.

mplayer works best for me, but I had an ati driver and I had to install specific drivers for it. Which flavor of linux do you have? If you have ubuntu, you should be fine, otherwise, look into installing the specific driver for your graphic card.

Usually, though, linux software scaling for videos is very, very slow, so unless you have a newer cpu, it would be a hardware issue. (Did you try using a system monitor such as "gkrellm"--visual-- or "top"--command line-- for seeing if you're either running out of cpu or ram?) Since your screen is so big, it should not be a problem, but if in doubt, use the command "xvinfo | grep max" and you should get the max hardware rendering resolution for your graphics card.

And I agree, update your codecs. If possible, use the win32 codecs that are not opensource. I've had the best luck with those--even playing realmedia files, though well when not with subs.

[sukida]

> I see you've tried most of the options.

Don't know whether I have.

> ... look into installing the specific driver for your graphic card.

The problem occurs identically whether I use xfree86 + proprietary driver or xorg + open source driver.

Debian.

> Did you try using a system monitor such as "gkrellm"--visual-- or "top"--command line-- for seeing if you're either running out of cpu or ram

System load (whether CPU, RAM, or disk) has no relation to the truncating.

> "xvinfo | grep max" and you should get the max hardware rendering resolution for your graphics card.

Interesting.

My video card is a 32MB Matrox G550 with DVI and VGA output, which has a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536. Yet your command says "maximum XvImage size: 1024 x 1024".
Why would that be?

> And I agree, update your codecs. If possible, use the win32 codecs that are not opensource.

Are you referring to marrilat's .deb'?

Thanks.

[ethidda]

So I'm not a graphics card expert, but basically I imagine that videos require graphics card support whereas the plain desktop does not. So your graphics card can display the desktop but not the video because the video requires more driver support. (Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Have you tried editing the config file for your mplayer so that it would scale automatically on playback? You'd want to google mplayer's .config file to see the options you can have.

Otherwise, I would really suggest either posting in the debian or the mplayer forums. There are probably a lot more people there who are more experienced with such issues.