deinterlacing is default

[Sylvain BERTRAND]

Binary package hint: totem

deinterlacing should be off by default since it eats a *lot* of CPU.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

If deinterlacing were to be turned off by default a lot of users would experience poor video playback "out of the box" and it is unlikely that they would know what to do to fix it.

This high CPU use will be solved in time as support for GPU accelerated video decoding such as XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation), VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) and VA-API becomes more widespread. For those not familiar with the Linux video APIs and extensions, XvMC is capable of offloading the video decoding of motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform) work to the GPU for MPEG-2 video files. VDPAU supports motion compensation, iDCT, VLD, and deblocking, but for many more formats. The supported VDPAU formats include up through MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, H.264 / AVC, VC-1, and WMV9, but some video hardware is not capable of supporting all formats.

For example software implementations see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njg4Ng and http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODUzOQ

For info on the underlying benefits which can be supported/used by any software see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODEwNg (this was indeed merged in to the 2.6.35 kernel) and http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODcxOA

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Also see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2010-November/003860.html for an update.

[Sylvain BERTRAND (sylvain-bertrand)]

Then, small-old systems (like my father's computer) won't be able to read out of the box interlaced movies (movies of his holidays) because the CPU requirements for deinterlacing is too high for his system.

Note: open source GPU accelerated video postprocessing rules out VDPAU since it's a proprietary API.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

Another update - more progress has been made:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODgwOQ

All your father has to do to watch movies of his holidays is select Preferences from Totem's Edit menu, then select the Display tab and then tick "Disable deinterlacing of interlaced videos". However I'm not sure if they will look good interlaced.

Regarding the CPU requirements for deinterlacing being too high for small-old systems, this is a familiar story in computing. The computer which I owned previous to the computer previous to my current computer (does that make sense? - I mean two computers ago) would choke and become almost completely unresponsive to keyboard and mouse input whenever it was displaying a web page with a flash animation (such as many flash ads). I kept flash installed since I could (just) successfully playback flash movies, but I couldn't do anything else (not even scroll the page) at the same time. The same computer could also just manage smooth playback of a 320x240 MPEG-2 file from disk - CPU went to 100%. The computer was a Pentium MMX 166MHz, by the time I was having these experiences it was 6 years old, I ended up dismantling it and taking the parts to the recycling centre, then buying a new computer. Fortunately these days the use of lead (Pb) in computer parts is much less common.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

The other option for your father to watch movies of his holidays on his small-old system is to stick with Ubuntu 10.04, which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release and has a version of Totem which does not do deinterlacing.

Why does he want/need to run the latest Ubuntu 10.10 on such an old system?

[madbiologist (me-again)]

There has been some work done on deinterlacing in the newly released GStreamer Good Plug-ins 0.10.26. From the release notes:

Features of this release

* deinterlace: remove assembly code in favor of orc

Orc is the Optimized Inner Loops Runtime Compiler and should allow the developers to make performance improvements.

This package should soon make it's way into the Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" repositories (you can monitor this at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gst-plugins-good0.10 ). When it does, can you please download the Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" alpha 1 LiveCD, update to gst-plugins-good0.10 0.10.26 and test?

[Sylvain BERTRAND (sylvain-bertrand)]

I don't think my father will be able to burn an iso image, but I'll try.
Worst case scenario: we'll see next year. Better case scenario, gstreamer good 0.10.26 goes into 10.10.

[madbiologist (me-again)]

gst-plugins-good0.10 0.10.26-1 for Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" is available GStreamer developers PPA at https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive/ppa
Just make sure that you select "Maverick" in the box next to "Overview of all packages published in ", then click the adjacent Filter button.

Note that I'm not promising that this will be better. However it is the kind of change that could lead to better performance.

I still don't really understand why your father wants/needs to run the latest Ubuntu 10.10 on such an old system? Also, all he has to do to watch movies of his holidays is select Preferences from Totem's Edit menu, then select the Display tab and then tick "Disable deinterlacing of interlaced videos". However I'm not sure if they will look good interlaced.

[Sylvain BERTRAND (sylvain-bertrand)]

I'll test next week-end, as I will have physical access to his computer. I'll see if de-interlacing is fast enough for his CPU with that new code.

[Sylvain BERTRAND (sylvain-bertrand)]

Could not test it. Pulseaudio/totem bug with soundblaster live card: pulseaudio eats 50% of CPU (Duron 700MHz). Additionnally I had to remove xapian indexing (python apt thingy) stuff as it eats CPU and fairly too much *resident* memory (100 MB for a 400MB system).

Did some tests with gnome-mplayer: no pulseaudio bug;plays the video smoothly without de-interlacing;but uses 95% of CPU.
I did the same test with straight mplayer: uses 75% of CPU.

Ubuntu 10.10 desktop is *several times slower* than previous versions (firefox is now barely usable).

What are the official minimal hardware requirements for ubuntu 10.10?

[madbiologist (me-again)]

The minimal hardware requirements for Ubuntu 10.10 are at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

This is a bit more than the system you have described, so you might want to consider using Xubuntu, which uses the lighter-weight Xfce desktop environment instead of the GNOME desktop environment. The hardware requirements for Xubuntu are also discussed on the page I linked to in the first paragraph of this comment. You could even use Lubuntu, which uses the LxDE desktop environment, although this version is not officially supported yet. I have previously used LxDE on Knoppix 6.01 and found it quite good. I've never used (or even seen) Xfce.

[Sylvain BERTRAND (sylvain-bertrand)]

Ok, got it. My father's computer was able to handle at acceptable speed previous versions of ubuntu, now it's impossible as ubuntu is too heavy.

Will switch my father's computer to another distro. Will try Xubuntu/Lunbuntu though.

You can close that report.