IRIX and Software

I've got an Ubuntu box exporting an NFS share to my O2. I use the Ubuntu box to snag YouTube videos I like (music videos etc.) and save them on the exported NFS share. I use keepvid.com to download the streams and store them as MPEG4 movies. These play back great on PCs but when I use mplayer (neko/mips4) to play them back all I get is audio. The video shows nothing - mainly a black screen and sometimes a static frame of noise. I do get the audio fine.

I used mencoder lavl to convert the video to mpeg4, but that didn't help either. After 1 minute of audio playing I got one video frame and that's it. Nothing further, no other motion or changes in the video at all. I have played around with the video output driver (X, SGI, gl2, gl etc.) and that doesn't make any difference.

Any clues?

Update: ffplay works, but performance is really bad. Frame rate is maybe 3-5fps and audio keeps stuttering. Interesting thing is that mplayer uses ffmpeg also, so I don't know what that doesn't work.

Are there any noteworthy mplayer switches to make it run faster? I tried dropframes and all the other switches that logically seemed like they would make a difference, but no joy thus far. Also use libmpeg2 and that only outputs sound with no video window even showing up.

I wonder could be a ICE and MPEG4 compatibility thing? If ICE can run MPEG4 then it should play smoother (That's if your mplayer is running through ICE).

There is a specially coded irix xvid/mpeg4 player thing written by an ex-sgi employee (little wave to brendan) that does a reasonable job even on an O2.

Beyond that, dont expect the ICE to accelerate anything else than MJPEG and some OGL Imaging extensions (cf Cesar Blecuas Udias' very helpful notes on the matter). The docs on using/coding for the ICE were never released to the public. Some say they are collecting mould in a soggy cardboard box in some dank warehouse where shiney new-SGI dumped all the junk from crusty old-SGI.

I'm a youthful cynic, so I think the docs never existed in the first place and the only reference to the ICE is in the heads of the engineers who built the damn thing in 1846.

jimmer, where could one find this specially coded xvid player?

I guess this is the one referred to:

http://www.blackboxcentral.com/sgimonkey/

It's really out-of-date though..

Thanks jimmer and mmk, I did download irixdivx and tried that too. It didn't play the MP4 files. Here is what is working, though this is far from perfect:

1. Download video from keepvid as MP4
2. Transfer over to O2 over NFS
3. ffmpeg -i <videofile.mp4> <newvideofile.mpg>
4. mediaplayer <newvideofile.mpg>

Operation #3 reduced the size of a 26MB video to about 10.5MB which means there is some downsampling going on. The quality isn't all that great. Pixellates the moment you make the video big. BUT the good news is that it plays without missing frames, at native speed, and is perfectly in synch with the audio. There is definitely a difference between mediaplayer performance when compared to both ffplay and irixdivx.

I just wanted to document the above so that others who might be trying to play youtube videos on IRIX might find these steps when they search the forum.

Just to demonstrate the somewhat happy ending, here's Aqua, my O2 R10K 195Mhz 128MB happily running:

Dillo
Gimp
Xmms
Mplayer with YouTube video
Clock
aterm
winterm

At the time I took this snapshot I was running a video I downloaded from YouTube, and had a 1920x1080 image open in YouTube. Probably also had 4-5 Dillo windows going. Thanks to [C-E] for the background! I'm using it!

BTW, for those who may be wondering, the video sgifanatic is playing is Roxette's "Listen to Your Heart," featuring the über-fantabulous Marie Fredriksson...

The bottom line is the O2 does not have enough horsepower for mp4 video. When the DivX codec first came out it had playback issues on 333Mhz AMD cpus. I have an old P4 1.8Ghz (with the slower 133Mhz FSB) and it will not play 480p youtube videos properly.

My dual 300 Octane plays most divx/mp4 videos at a watchable speed using videolan. For some reason using the sgi video switch barely works. If you pick -gl or -gl2 most things play great.

vishnu wrote: BTW, for those who may be wondering, the video sgifanatic is playing is Roxette's "Listen to Your Heart," featuring the über-fantabulous Marie Fredriksson...

Hell yes. I'm planning a vacation with the family to Stockholm and Halmstad so we can be in the same neighbourhood as Marie and Per. Even if for a while. They are simply too darn cool.

According to their website they've got two shows planned in Stockholm this year, otherwise they're touring just about everywhere. Except the US..

vishnu wrote: According to their website they've got two shows planned in Stockholm this year, otherwise they're touring just about everywhere. Except the US..

Sorry to reawaken an old thread, but we were finally able to see Roxette play live, up in Boston, at the end of 2012. Took the whole fam up there and had an absolute ball. Marie was amazing, as was Per. I felt like I was a teenager again, for a few hours