[adrianp]

I have XBMC 10 (Dharma) set up on Fedora 14 but to get VAAPI accelerated video playback working, I had to use an external mplayer via playercorefactory.xml. I heard that Eden has this enabled for the built-in so I went through the process of cloning the latest from git and running with "configure --enable-vaapi". Everything seemed smooth, there are vaapi options under System > Video, and when I hit 'o' during playback, I see a line with vaapi in it so I assume some part of that is working.

However, video playback is terrible. All videos are slow at best and some are blocky or get stuck in loops and when I experimented with some different playback options, XBMC would crash more often than not. It's definitely not the speed improvement I was looking for.

Does anyone know how to confirm that the built-in player really is running with VAAPI hardware acceleration?

Can anyone tell me what the status of vaapi support is in XBMC - should this be working or is it all in such early stages that these crashes are expected?

Thanks!

[wsnipex]

it should be working. please post a debug log.

[alanwww1]

I have XBMC 10 (Dharma) set up on Fedora 14 but to get VAAPI accelerated video playback working, I had to use an external mplayer via playercorefactory.xml. I heard that Eden has this enabled for the built-in so I went through the process of cloning the latest from git and running with "configure --enable-vaapi". Everything seemed smooth, there are vaapi options under System > Video, and when I hit 'o' during playback, I see a line with vaapi in it so I assume some part of that is working.

However, video playback is terrible. All videos are slow at best and some are blocky or get stuck in loops and when I experimented with some different playback options, XBMC would crash more often than not. It's definitely not the speed improvement I was looking for.

Does anyone know how to confirm that the built-in player really is running with VAAPI hardware acceleration?

Can anyone tell me what the status of vaapi support is in XBMC - should this be working or is it all in such early stages that these crashes are expected?

Thanks!

Your xbmc is not compiled with vaapi enabled at configure time. Also Dharma is really outdated with vaapi support. A lot of fixes came into the main branch since than. Use a fresh xbmc compile with a fresh vaapi and intel driver compile. Make sure you compile vaapi first so at xbmc configure time check if it really is enabled.

xbmc git: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git
vaapi git: git://anongit.freedesktop.org/vaapi/libva
intel driver git: git://anongit.freedesktop.org/vaapi/intel-driver

There is a really easy guide made myself, but that is for Ubuntu. In Ubuntu ppas we have vaapi and libbluray enabled for Oneiric builds.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=114368

[adrianp]

The forum rules box at the bottom says I can't post attachments and the logs are pretty big for just dumping as text. Is there a bug forum somewhere or is there a trick to posting attachments?

I have two debug logs. One is when we try to play back at 1080p mkv trailer. On an mplayer build that has vaapi support, this is smooth and problem-free but with the built-in player we're getting a lot of dropped frames and playback is choppy and jerky.

The second is worse. We tried to play an avi rip of a DVD which plays fairly well on the built-in player on Dharma and plays perfectly with the vaapi-enabled mplayer, but on our Eden build with vaapi, the video is unwatchable. The screen is blocky and filled with defects.

BTW: When we type 'o', the second line shows:

D(Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 1920x800 [PAR 1:1 DAR 12:5], 3475 kb/s) P(fr:23.976, vq: 99%, dc:ff-h264-vaapi, Mb/s:3.01, drop:1350, pc:none)

So it looks like vaapi is there.

[Bootlegninja]

Open the file and copy the text.

Then make [ code][ /code] tags (remove spaces in the brackets) and paste that text in between them. It will post it up for you.

[wsnipex]

Open the file and copy the text.

Then make [ code][ /code] tags (remove spaces in the brackets) and paste that text in between them. It will post it up for you.

please don't, use pastebin.com for the debug.log

[adrianp]

When I try to copy the text of the log it refuses, saying: "The text that you have entered is too long (81366 characters). Please shorten it to 10000 characters long."

Should I be posting it in 9 chunks or is there some portion that is most important?

[adrianp]

please don't, use pastebin.com for the debug.log

D'oh, why didn't I think of that. Drr.

The glitchy AVI DVD rip: http://pastebin.com/D7SThrB0

The 1080p mkv trailer with lots of dropped frames and slow, jerky playback: http://pastebin.com/kgTBRcy4

[adrianp]

Um, newbie question: I enabled debugging in System settings and posted the .xbmc/temp/xbmc.log

Is there an actual debug.log that I should be using instead?

Thanks for the help, btw.

[alanwww1]

Use the latest libva builds. On Ubuntu there is no problem at all.

[adrianp]

Use the latest libva builds. On Ubuntu there is no problem at all.

We're forced to use some EMGD drivers which Intel has only provided for very specific versions of Linux so we're stuck with Fedora 14. That said, we're running libva the latest one that yum found: libva-freeworld-0.31.1-1.sds4.fc14.i686

Is that out of date enough to explain what we're seeing?

[adrianp]

I stripped out the freeworld vaapi driver and installed libva-1.0.12-1.fc14.i686 which isn't the very latest, but is very close (April 2011). I think the latest is 1.0.14 so we're pretty close. Is it good enough?

With this version, we still get some very poor playback. Even though the CPU utilization is way down (~30%), we're only getting 6-7fps!

When trying to render a video it gets about 15 seconds of choppy playback (and a rapidly increasing dropped frames count) then it gets slower and finally grinds to a halt, flipping back between two frames. The CPU doesn't even max out which is doubly weird.

I grabbed a debug log and posted it at: http://pastebin.com/67pD3Lcs

When the video would just flip between the two frames, it kept printing:

Code:

12:37:50 T:2674080624 WARNING: CRenderManager::FlipPage - timeout waiting for flip to complete
12:37:51 T:2674080624 WARNING: CRenderManager::FlipPage - timeout waiting for previous frame
12:37:52 T:2665687920 WARNING: Previous line repeats 1 times.