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OS/2 - SIGs => OS2 Petition => Topic started by: WarpWorld on 2009.02.14, 11:59:05

Title: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: WarpWorld on 2009.02.14, 11:59:05
I suggest to you,to our forum (members,moderators,administrators) to start petition for producing VLC Player for eComStation...That player excisted for some dead systems as BeOS  ::) ,but not for our eCS.We must change it ;)
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: chennecke on 2009.02.14, 14:57:39
I see two issues:


Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: RobertM on 2009.02.14, 20:25:42
Hi,

I agree that efforts should be directed at continued work on SMPlayer/QT4. The back end stuff for both (VLC and mPlayer) is still based off ffMPEG, so with a working and maintainable smPlayer, there is no reason for splitting that effort to get VLC Player working. The GUI is the only advantage VLC Player has over mPlayer - which is something that smPlayer takes care of.

-Robert
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.15, 00:10:27
I find SMPLayer to be more powerful than VLC in many cases. Hell, it even will auto-fetch Subtitle files for movies which is fantastic because it makes it easy for me to watch stuff with my Hard of hearing friend.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: RobertM on 2009.02.15, 19:09:19
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.15, 00:10:27
I find SMPLayer to be more powerful than VLC in many cases. Hell, it even will auto-fetch Subtitle files for movies which is fantastic because it makes it easy for me to watch stuff with my Hard of hearing friend.

Oh - wow! That was not a feature I had previously found... thanks Saijin Naib!
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.16, 14:53:04
NP Rob. The SMPlayer team has the goal to make it a very feature rich app that not only can do advanced playback but transcoding and possibly editing/splitting as well. I'd keep an eye out on that and make sure we keep up with SMPlayer because these capabilities are rather lacking on the OS/2 platform and this one target may fill that gap.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: RobertM on 2009.02.16, 21:14:45
Regarding smPlayer, there is a new build of the 521 version at Netlabs (Jan 23, 2009) - in WPI format:
ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/smplayer/
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: obiwan on 2009.02.19, 07:14:51
I just did some testing with VLC vs. mplayer vs. ogle on a couple different Linux systems. Different hardware, different distros, with only DVD playback, using several new discs. Mplayer and ogle showed some annoying problems with timing and video quality on both systems, while VLC had no problems, and video quality was superb.

Given this, I wish I had time to see about porting VLC. It's true the GUI needs wxWidgets, but the video playback itself just uses SDL, so if the wxWidgets interface really won't work it isn't necessarily a show-stopper. I think if my only experience with mplayer were on /2, I would think it was the OS causing the problems, which is not the case.

Maybe later.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.19, 08:29:36
They all use the same backend which is mplayer or ffmpeg. I don't see any reason for sync issues unless you didnt set a parameter correct such as cache size etc.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: obiwan on 2009.02.19, 09:04:25
Ogle doesn't have a cache setting. No setting made any difference to some of the problems (e.g. being unable to find which feature on the disk is the movie). Even if what you are saying applies, it means the difference between a clunky player and a polished one, since VLC worked perfectly every time.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: ivan on 2009.02.19, 12:56:41
I have to say that I find mplayer is a dead loss on any of the OS/2 machines here.  The longest it has played any dvd is 1 minute 48 seconds.  If I want more I must fiddle with it and then maybe it will play a little more.  To watch dvds I run VLC on a cut down linux in vbox - without any problems!

I am not a programmer or I would try porting it as well as Deluge for bitTorent.

I would say to those that have mplayer or mplayer/smplayer working well - not just working - PLEASE give me the full incantation that you use and on what hardware.  That way I might be able to get it working here.

***** My apologies, it is not vbox but virtualPC in the first paragraph. That's what you get when you think of two things and try and listen to a conversation at the same time!

Another thing, has anyone got sound to work in vbox on OS/2?
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: RobertM on 2009.02.19, 17:12:10
Quote from: obiwan on 2009.02.19, 09:04:25
Ogle doesn't have a cache setting. No setting made any difference to some of the problems (e.g. being unable to find which feature on the disk is the movie). Even if what you are saying applies, it means the difference between a clunky player and a polished one, since VLC worked perfectly every time.


No... it really doesnt. There are settable parameters in either smPlayer or mPlayer to help with that. Fixing those will resolve the issue.

On my system, smPlayer does better than mPlayer alone (odd, huh?) It's all about the config setup.

So, it just means the others need something a little better to tune themselves based off hardware. That should be easy enough since mPlayer reads that info on start.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: osw on 2009.02.19, 19:14:54
Quote from: ivan on 2009.02.19, 12:56:41
I have to say that I find mplayer is a dead loss on any of the OS/2 machines here.  The longest it has played any dvd is 1 minute 48 seconds.  If I want more I must fiddle with it and then maybe it will play a little more.  To watch dvds I run VLC on a cut down linux in vbox - without any problems!

I am not a programmer or I would try porting it as well as Deluge for bitTorent.

I would say to those that have mplayer or mplayer/smplayer working well - not just working - PLEASE give me the full incantation that you use and on what hardware.  That way I might be able to get it working here.

***** My apologies, it is not vbox but virtualPC in the first paragraph. That's what you get when you think of two things and try and listen to a conversation at the same time!

Another thing, has anyone got sound to work in vbox on OS/2?

HI!
well, you must doing something awfuly wrong there... mplayer with proper settings in config does all job like a charm - I do prefer vanila guiless mplayer over smplayer which is what happens when porting qt to wps... a disaster - so my advice is RTFM...
As for sound in vbox... once you do RTFM - you will know that vbox ose (open source edition) for os/2 does not produce sound at all... so I can say wonderfull vlc does work for you without any problem on linux in vbox/2, without sound too.... - so thanks I'll stay with mplayer for now...

I did some tests with vlc on windoze and... i stay with mplayer on windoze too...
Why? So one of the first movies I got via torrent did refuse to work with vlc - demanding (sic!) some codecs to install first... something I never expirienced with mplayer... and I've use to not even check the formats of downloaded movies as I'm sure that "every" will be playable by mplayer - natively or via wrapped codecs... frankly I did not install them yet, never needed them.
Once vlc start to behave as solid as mplayer I will use it too... but for now it is more fashionable but not better in doing it's job - playing videos.
It's common now to hear, especially from lamers on net :"VLC is cool, it is the best" Yeah, but when you ask if they ever used mplayer, they use to answer "Windows Media Player is shit" ... so it gives you some impression about popularity of both. VLC makes every lamer an expert - Mplayer is for experts. Not really user friendly - but frankly, is config.sys of os/2 user friendly?

cheers
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.19, 19:42:15
Clearly you are an expert as well, because you obviously know that VLC is just a GUI front-end to Mplayer which you love so much  ::)
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: osw on 2009.02.19, 20:18:53
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.19, 19:42:15
Clearly you are an expert as well, because you obviously know that VLC is just a GUI front-end to Mplayer which you love so much  ::)

I'm not sure if your post was pointed at me... but I do assume it.
So, I never told I'm an expert... just happy mplayer user. If my happiness makes me expert? Well I'm about to belive that reading posts of people who  found mplayer useless... and they consider vlc better despite the fact
there is no port of vlc for os/2 yet (isn't this topic about porting it? and isn't that forum about os/2)
So what makes me worry about whole disscussion is that some guys try to translate their experiences with mplayer or vlc from other platforms (linux, or like me windoze) forgetting about such factors like sound drivers (alsa vs. oss on linux) or graphics backend (to much to mention) and comes to conclusion that mplayer is weak, crappy, not working and so... - so I did test on vlc and came with similar conclusions about VLC - based on my windoze experience... for me it's worse than mplayer there...
So still I've higher ground - as mplayer for os/2 do exists - and VLC don't. Calling mplayer an app for experts was bit ironic (sorry if you didn't get it) - it's being expert same way as editing config.sys for os/2... - hard to survive on warp without that rare skill... (excuse me - ironical again)

Back to your discoveries - I didn't know VLC is gui-front end for mplayer, and what is more funny guys who work on VLC don't know it either... (they must be wrong of course, claimming it's their project - bad french guys ;) ) but guys from mplayer (hungarian good guys ;) ) did mention vlc as app that reuses the software scaler code from MPlayer so there are some connections indeed (some crucial parts from mplayer are needed to run vlc) ... but not the one you tell, vlc is not gui front end for mplayer. Smplayer is.

You must not be an expert to use mplayer nor to google things.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: obiwan on 2009.02.20, 00:57:08
Quote from: RobertM on 2009.02.19, 17:12:10
No... it really doesnt. There are settable parameters in either smPlayer or mPlayer to help with that. Fixing those will resolve the issue.

There were multiple issues, not just one, and the fix for all of them, in the end, was to install VLC. That was easier than figuring out whatever the parameters needed to be. An application that sets itself up correctly without intervention is by that fact more polished, and preferable to work with.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: ivan on 2009.02.20, 12:58:44
osw said
Quotewell, you must doing something awfuly wrong there... mplayer with proper settings in config does all job like a charm - I do prefer vanila guiless mplayer over smplayer which is what happens when porting qt to wps... a disaster - so my advice is RTFM...
I am trying to RTFM - the only problem is that there is no FM!  Also you must have missed what I said - it starts and plays the dvd for a short time then stops - it can be made to play some more for a time that is variable but after the first ten minutes I just give up trying to make it work.  Maybe you would like to post your settings that make it work like a charm (and also what hardware you are using).

obiwan is correct in saying
QuoteAn application that sets itself up correctly without intervention is by that fact more polished, and preferable to work with.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Rob Claessen on 2009.02.20, 15:57:59
Here  (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html)is the FM for mplayer, its about 100 pages or so ?

The configfile I use with mplayer, which works fine for me is:

# Write your default config options here!
##
## MPlayer input control file
##
nocache=1
user-agent=NSPlayer/4.1.0.3856
vo=kva:dive
autosync=90
sid=16
slang=1
ni=1

Not sure where that user-agent thingy came from, but it seems to do the job, at least it doesn't hurt.

You also need to tell OS/2 where to find mplayer in the config.sys, specially if you want the Mozilla plugin to work :

SET MPLAYER_PATH=X:\Applications\Mplayer\mplayer.exe
SET MPLAYER_HOME=X:\HOME\DEFAULT\.mplayer
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: osw on 2009.02.20, 17:01:58
Quote from: ivan on 2009.02.20, 12:58:44
osw said
Quotewell, you must doing something awfuly wrong there... mplayer with proper settings in config does all job like a charm - I do prefer vanila guiless mplayer over smplayer which is what happens when porting qt to wps... a disaster - so my advice is RTFM...
I am trying to RTFM - the only problem is that there is no FM!  Also you must have missed what I said - it starts and plays the dvd for a short time then stops - it can be made to play some more for a time that is variable but after the first ten minutes I just give up trying to make it work.  Maybe you would like to post your settings that make it work like a charm (and also what hardware you are using).

obiwan is correct in saying
QuoteAn application that sets itself up correctly without intervention is by that fact more polished, and preferable to work with.


Hi!
Here is TFM - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html - happy time reading...;)
Also I must admit - playing dvd's with mplayer is somewhat crappy (perhaps it's time for me to RTFM again ;) ) - but I did short investigation and it does work under smplayer - when dvd structure is chosen from directories - then you can see list of all chapters and I did open some to see what happens after 1m 48s ..;) - so it did play entire chapter 16m long... that way you can watch dvd's with mplayer (but it's not as convenient as simple putting dvd into drive and waiting for autostart - that's right - or clicking fancy buttons)

Here is my <boot drive>:\home\default\.mplayer\config :

ao=dart
vo=kva:snap
pp=6
#double=yes
font=arial.ttf
subfont-text-scale=4
subcp=cp1250
vf=screenshot=pp=de,hqdn3d=lavcdeint=denoise3d:4:3:6
#aspect=4:3
#aspect=16:9
subfont-encoding=unicode
sub-no-text-pp=1
#noidx=1
# Settings for stream/file caching
cache=8192
cache-min=30
#vf=expand=0:-90:0:0
# Setting for Browser User Agent response
user-agent=NSPlayer/4.1.0.3856
colorkey=0x000001

well in addition to that there is arial.ttf in the same directory
and enabled freetype2 via. ft2gui2 for mplayer.exe - to have nice antialiased fonts

my hardware is:
singlecore celeron 2.2 ghz (nortwood) on MSI 845PE MAX with 768 MB of DDR1 RAM
soundcard is sblive 5.1 (emu101)
graphics card is sapphire radeon 9600 PRO Atlantis with 128 MB RAM on 128-bit bus (identified by SNAP as 9600 XT...)
mouse is  logitech on usb under amouse driver

my software is:
operating system is ECS 2.0 rc5
smp os/4 kernel (experimental one) with acpi(3.14)  - /smp /apic /cd switches
Snap build is 505 - and it drives 23'' samsung (sm2343bw) lcd panel with native resolution 2048 * 1152 on DVI cable
sblive driver is native one 0.82 beta - smp ready
mplayer build is mplayer-dev-SVN-r27724-OS2-4.3.2

as you can see there is no fancy hardware or unusual soft here and yes "everything" works like a charm for me - except DVD's ;) - but it's something I did realize today ;) frankly never needed play them from pc - standalone dvd player (cost ~ 25 euro...) is getting more and more dust here on rack - only expierience with dvd's I got are constant glitches with scratched discs... and that's why prefer anything else what is not structured like mpegs2/4 spread on 4.7 GB in 900MB chunks... but of course it's only my opinion and I do agree that inconvenient way, mplayer plays dvd's is it's disadvantage - if vlc is smooth on that, that's for sure another good reason to port it to os/2 (beside possibility to compare them on warp like apples to apples...)

another disadvantage which I found (for your information) is fact that in such config, mplayer is bit to slow to play hd.wmv movies (720p) - so I play them with kmp.exe - K Movie Player is let's call it "custom build of mplayer (?)" -
made by KO Myung-Hun - and being based on mplayer - is somehow optimized on speed and less hungry for MHz's, so it can play such movies smoothly unfortunately my system is really to slow  :( to process fullHD movies (1080p) but again I did only checked that wmv's - so it might be that other formats will produce different effects.

ps. I'm not quite sure if eventual port of vlc/2 (cute name ;)) will resolve buggy dvd support as it sports libdvdcss library - and that is what do response for dvd part of player - mplayer is using it also (dvdcss.dll under os/2)- so you should expect similar problems with vlc/2 unless you improve os/2 port of libdvdcss somehow... - it will resolve mplayer issues too ;))

cheers
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: ivan on 2009.02.20, 18:28:12
Thank you both Rob and osw.  Now I need the tome to copy the manual pages to local HD  then turn the html into a pdf file for future reference.

I assume the autostart you mentioned osw is some windows thing as I've never seen any autostart of dvds on OS/2.  Another thing, I am using OS/2 not eCs - maybe that is part of the problem.  My only use would be to play dvds or the odd avi - I too have a stand alone dvd player but my monitor is larger than the TV so dvds are now watched via the computer hence my frustration with mplayer.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.20, 20:17:14
You are going to be hard-pressed to play back any true HD video over 720p without some hardware acceleration, or even something as simple as hardware overlay. If you are lucky enough to have your graphics chipset supported by SNAP you may get some help there, if not, true HD is going to be a bit slow.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: osw on 2009.02.20, 21:43:09
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.20, 20:17:14
You are going to be hard-pressed to play back any true HD video over 720p without some hardware acceleration, or even something as simple as hardware overlay. If you are lucky enough to have your graphics chipset supported by SNAP you may get some help there, if not, true HD is going to be a bit slow.

Hi!
Well, actually my graphics (radeon 9600pro) is among best SNAP supported chipsets, it's a bit dated but has dvi output and native lcd panel programming - in fact only radeon chipsets gives you all features of snap (acceleration, tv output support, mixed multihead mode (crt+dfp), snap hardware overlay support, zooming) -  SNAP hardware overlay is in use here (what is stated in mplayer config -  vo=kva:snap) also KMP does use snapwrap.dll - so as you can see I'm using full features set of snap driver... - and as a long time warp user  I've learn to pick hardware in os/2 in mind... so that's why I can be lucky now ;) - not a big deal really.

Anyway, I'm watching now 1280*720 movies with no problems with kmp but not mplayer, and cpu usage
is 60 - 80 %, so there is still some horsepower to run vbox/2 with xp2sp2 on one of three virtual screens (xpager) and still have healthy fully operational quick responsing system next to it (not to mention firefox 3.2alpha running here as well).
But trying 1920*1080 movies brings me 98% of cpu usage and slowed down playback  despite snap overlay and snap acceleration active. I think weak cpu is bottleneck in this case.

ps. Before snap introduced overlay support I used warpoverlay with geforce2mx400 (it also did a great job). So I'm not talking here about playing anything via DIVE as it's really hard to expect good effects with it even on multicores.

cheers
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.22, 21:00:04
I want to clarify myself on a previous post and say that if you want to get technical, VLC can be considered a front-end to Mplayer because VLC and Mplayer are both heavily reliant upon FFMPEG, the core playback technology behind Mplayer and VLC. In fact, Mplayer is almost entirely comprised of FFMPEG code and many of the FFMPEG team are Mplayer developers. So yes, it may not be rigorously true that VLC is just a Mplayer front-end, but my statement is not entirely wrong either.

OSW, what is your CPU? I don't recall reading what it was.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: osw on 2009.02.22, 23:40:02
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.22, 21:00:04

OSW, what is your CPU? I don't recall reading what it was.

Hi!
It's a singlecore Intel Celeron 2.2 GHz (Nortwood).
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2009.02.23, 00:31:10
Okay, I have a single core Northwood 3.06ghz with HT, but HD Is not significantly much easier here. I'd suggest a Core2Duo or a Corei7.
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: RobertM on 2009.02.27, 23:25:23
Quote from: obiwan on 2009.02.20, 00:57:08
Quote from: RobertM on 2009.02.19, 17:12:10
No... it really doesnt. There are settable parameters in either smPlayer or mPlayer to help with that. Fixing those will resolve the issue.

There were multiple issues, not just one, and the fix for all of them, in the end, was to install VLC. That was easier than figuring out whatever the parameters needed to be. An application that sets itself up correctly without intervention is by that fact more polished, and preferable to work with.

Agreed - hence the point I was trying to make in one of my posts is that what is needed is an installer or run-time procedure that fine tunes those specs to the hardware involved - since we do not have VLC player for OS/2 that is.  ;)
Title: Re: VLC Player for OS/2
Post by: RobertM on 2009.02.27, 23:33:00
Quote from: osw on 2009.02.19, 20:18:53

Back to your discoveries - I didn't know VLC is gui-front end for mplayer, and what is more funny guys who work on VLC don't know it either... (they must be wrong of course, claimming it's their project - bad french guys ;) ) but guys from mplayer (hungarian good guys ;)

Oh... they know it - it's a mix of ffMPEG stuff (and the related codec packages used in ffMPEG) and their own stuff.

From Wikipedia:
"Many of VLC's codecs are provided by the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project, but it uses mainly its own muxer and demuxers."

The last part of the claim on Wikipedia is a somewhat recent change (ie: "mainly").

Looking at VLC's page, you will see a list of the ffMPEG project's codecs as being used (with some mention of the ffMPEG portions). For example:

From the VLC Pages:
QuoteWMV-3 / WMV-9 / VC-1 playback is provided through the FFmpeg-library starting with VLC 0.8.6.

Real Audio playback is provided through the FFmpeg-library which does only support a limited number of RA derivatives.

And other related libraries:
QuoteDVD decryption is done through the libdvdcss library.

VLC on GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows has playback control support via libcdio and libvcdinfo.