[Msan]

Where can I get this Planet Earth Bird Scene file that everybody is using to test the HD capabilities?

[pike]

Killa Sample aka. 'Bird Scene' from Planet Earth: http://rapidshare.com/files/82525583/kil...4.mkv.html

[Msan]

Thanks, much appreciated!

[marlboroman1]

I just try this on my desk top using XBMC for window just for kicks and I got a solid 7 frames a second me thinks my 2.0GHz CPU cant cut it

[jaredharley]

I get 7 fps on my laptop, and 9 fps on my desktop - my desktop is an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Dual core 2.22 GHz).

[gmackenz]

My 2 GHz Mac mini Core 2 Duo strained like a badly constipated critter and peaked early on at about 14 FPS with the OSXMBC 0.45 build. By near the end it was definitely a painful 6-7 FPS...

What a fiendish snippet of video...I read somewhere that this snippet may not have been the best possible (ie most efficient) encoding from the source though, and maybe our performance would possibly improve with a better encoding.

(On a related note)

What's really scary is the 4K & 5K video cameras from Red and the output from that may be downscaled to 2K for current high-end projectors at around 120 FPS!

Fortunately we won't see that on Mac/PC/HDTVs in the next few years...Have to wait for something else with capacities in the 100's of Gigs of storage medium.

[knatsch]

My Desktop PC (intel c2q, geforce 9600gt) plays this without problems. Obviously because of CoreAVC or some other hardware acceleration. I can see the load of 3 cores at 60-70%.
Is anyone able to playback this file flawlessly on xbmc linux?

[djh_]

Flawlessly in that I can't see it dropping frames, even though it is. Same goes for the many other scenes in Planet Earth that wreak havoc on, among other things, the Xbox 360.

[pike]

This clip is not representative of "normal" encodings. It's more of an extreme example. The encoder hasn't "capped" the max bitrate, so it peaks at 35-40Mbps

[pr0xy]

My Desktop PC (intel c2q, geforce 9600gt) plays this without problems. Obviously because of CoreAVC or some other hardware acceleration. I can see the load of 3 cores at 60-70%.
Is anyone able to playback this file flawlessly on xbmc linux?

Yes, no probs.

C2D E6750 @ 3.2 GHz, stock cooler. GPU: GeFORCE 8600 GT
Ubuntu 7.10
Build: 12736

/Proxy

[BLKMGK]

My Desktop PC (intel c2q, geforce 9600gt) plays this without problems. Obviously because of CoreAVC or some other hardware acceleration. I can see the load of 3 cores at 60-70%.
Is anyone able to playback this file flawlessly on xbmc linux?

Yes, I can play it back fine on my 3Ghz clocked C2D, the rest is in my sig. It's true this clip isn't very representative of normal video BUT I also happen to have this same scene as part of the Planet Earth series that *I* have encoded and it DID drop frames. that was prior to some code tweaks in XBMC and prior to my bumping to 3Ghz but that scene would drop frames and I'd see frames drop occasionally in action scenes too. I use a customized profile in meGUI encoding to H.264 using X264 - I get dual core decodes. My bitrate is 11000 and HD video compresses down about 1/3rd from it's native encoding from HD-DVD.

So, while not a great representation it is something worth shooting for. That scene is a pretty rough one but XBMC code is improving. I haven't always been able to play it without dropping frames even at 3Ghz. Bring up the stats while watching other high motion movies if you drop frames on this scene - you may find that you drop frames in other movies and don't notice it.

[waldo22]

The problem with a lot of h.264 encodes downloaded from the Internet, is that many people tend to encode their h.264 stuff at [email protected], instead of Level 4.1. They don't really understand what 5.1 is for, but many guides say 5.1 gives better quality (which of course is true) so they do it.

5.1 is used for the aforementioned 120fps @ 1080p, but is really no use for todays normal HD content. (from BluRays and HD DVD).

Has something to do with the number of B-Frames or I-Frames or some such thing (showing my ignorance here). There needs to be 4 or less in order to meet L4.1 profile.

More than that requires a good bit more processing power to decode.

What I'd like to see is for someone to rip something like the one of the Planet Earth HD DVD discs, and demux the EVO and remux into an MKV with a standard DTS/AC3 track (in other words, no transcoding at all), and see how XBMC Linux handles that.

HD DVDs and BluRay should both be encoded at L4.1, albeit at a high bitrate.

It should never really exceed 30 Mbps, and rarely exceed 20-25.

I'm guessing it couldn't handle it at this point without downsampling to 10-15 Mbps or so.

Another good test would be to transcode @ L4.1 and keep it under 15Mbps and see how that handles it.

I'd still like to see how it works with no transcoding, though.

[BLKMGK]

Heh, AVC on mine is "unrestricted". Yup, I'm probably putting far more work into my encodes than is needed but I'm still dropping of multiple gigs from the original and I've yet to see an artifact in anything I've watched.

This scene no matter what is pretty intense, I honestly wonder if some standalone players wouldn't stumble just a little bit! I would see some dropping in scenes like King Kong where the camera was panning past lots of foliage etc. in an action scene. Right now though I do not think I drop frames in anything I've got. XBMC has gotten better, noticeably. The Bird scene doesn't even peg my CPU last I checked, i'll try it in a bit tonight just to make sure I'm not overstating though.

Edit: Okay, just played it again. 1 droppedframe as it started - that normal. One core sat at 59% the whole time, the other peaked at 78%. Looks to me like XBMC has gotten good enough that a slightly slower CPU could decode this scene.Also, looked up what AVC profiles are and understand better what Waldo means. AVC levels aren't quality levels but are a sort of profile for different devices. I'm not putting any limitations on my encodes <shrug> and XBMC is handling it well. I have little doubt the configuration I use for my encodes is overkill.

[mpw222]

It almost plays on my laptop, a core 2 duo 2.2GHz with Quadro NVS 135 GPU, I get maybe 20fps. It plays easily on my desktop, a core 2 quad 3.15GHz (overclocked) with Geforce 8800gtx. This has led me to the rough conclusion that a core 2 duo at 3GHz or so is about the minimum chip I would be confident could play any type of media.

[embrion]

@waldo22: Most of p2p stuff is [email protected] because x264 uses this profile as default (at least the last time I read about it) and probably no one uses flag to change it.
@BLKMGK: Yes, standalone players also got problems with birds scene. For ex. Popcorn Hour. They all use the same family of Sigma chips designed for BluRay/HDDVD players so they support at best [email protected].
[email protected] is max 300 Mbit/s so there was no need to implement this into Sigmas as [email protected] is max 50 Mbit/s and BluRay movies are max 40 Mbit/s (video only)