Tweaking smplayer to improve performance. Configuring SMPlayer to use hardware video decoding Strengths of the SMP layer

For operating systems There are no native codecs based on the Linux kernel for playing HD video. It is, of course, possible to run Windows codecs on Linux via , but this is not exactly the solution that users of these operating systems are waiting for.

But as it turned out, the SMP layer multimedia player can be configured in such a way that it is possible to view HD video without “lags” not only in Windows OS.

Essentially, SMP layer is a graphical shell for Mplayer, which has enormous functionality.

Screenshots

Description

Strengths of SMP layer:

• SMP layer supports just a huge number of formats, which include Audio CD, DVD, Video CD, AVI, ASF /WMV/WMA, MOV /MP4, RealMedia, Ogg Vorbis, NUT, NSV, VIVO, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM (.cpk) format, RoQ, PVA and Matroska, recorded with video codecs DivX, MPEG -1, MPEG -2, MPEG -4, Sorenson, WMV, RealVideo, x264, H.264, MP3, Musepack, Vorbis, RealAudio, AC3 /A52 (Dolby Digital), AAC (MPEG -4 audio), QuickTime, VIVO audio, WMA and others.
• The “picture” of the video can be adjusted by changing the brightness, gamma, contrast, saturation and color tones.
• You can configure the display of subtitles. It is possible to change the subtitle font, its size, position and color.
• It is possible to control multiple video and audio tracks. SMP layer “understands” audio tracks as separate files.
• Using the mouse wheel is convenient for rewinding videos.
• It is possible to slow down the video a little or speed it up.
• You can apply 7 filters to the playing video: deinterlacing, post-processing, noise removal, karaoke filter, banding, blur and sharpening (their number may increase from version to version of this player).
• SMP layer allows you to select a demultiplexer of audio and video codecs.
• Very a large number of settings.
• Almost all languages ​​are supported.

Weaknesses of SMP layer:

No weaknesses identified.

Interface language: Russian

License type: GNU GPL

Installation

1. For OS Windows You can download the SMP layer version from the official project repository:
2. For OS Ubuntu A special PPA repository has been created, which will subsequently allow you to automatically update the application to new version. You can connect this repository by running 2 commands in sequence:
   

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer && sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install smplayer smtube smplayer-themes

   
   After successful installation, the SMP layer can be downloaded by going to the Gnome menu Apps→Audio and Video→SMP layer.

Smooth HD video playback in SMP layer

For owners nvidia video cards or ATI has specialized drivers, but for built-in Intel video cards Not everything is so rosy. Of course there is also special drivers(vaapi), but they do not always help Linux OS users. For example, no driver helps on Intel Atom. Only manual setting The SMP layer made it possible to achieve smooth HD video playback on Intel Atom.

Done:

• Disable frame drops Settings → Performance → Allow frame drops.
• disable direct rendering Settings → General → Video → Direct Rendering
• Specify the number of decoding threads, which should be equal to the number of cores Settings → Performance → Decoding streams
• Increasing the cache local files and streams. Selected experimentally. For example, for Intel Atom N280 their value is 400 MB, that is 400000 KB. Settings → Performance → Cache

P.S. Sometimes you want variety in your life. And you strive to achieve this diversity in everything: change the ringtone on your phone, change Windows themes, change your email password, and so on. And this desire is absolutely normal for every person. By the way, change the theme of the worker Windows desktop Almost anyone can do it; it’s a fairly simple and quick procedure.

Similar 7 programs:

Comments

1. OllyCat
   31 October, 01:39
2. ITShaman
   31 October, 05:08

   OllyCat:“For operating systems based on the Linux kernel, there are no native codecs for playing HD video.” – but the guys from ffmpeg don’t even know about it. :) I didn’t know either and that’s why I used native codecs until now. Now I will know and begin to suffer! ;)

SMPlayer is a free open-source multimedia player source code for Linux and Windows, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Unlike other players, it does not require the installation of codecs to play because it has its own required codecs.

This is the first release to support MPV and some other features such as MPRIS v2 support, new theme, 3D stereo filter and more. It is also capable of playing almost all known video and audio formats.

One of the most interesting features of SMPlayer is that it remembers the settings of all played files. So, if you start watching a movie, but you need to go somewhere... don't worry, when you open that movie, playback will resume at the same point where you left it, and with the same settings for example, audio track, subtitles, volume. .. SMPlayer can also play very well Youtube video, and includes handy tool, which allows you to search for videos on YouTube. This video player comes with multiple icon skins and themes so you can easily change appearance player. It can search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org, and is available in more than 30 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

List of features:

• Ability to display two subtitles simultaneously.
• Play videos from video sites such as Youtube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Vevo and many more.
• SMPlayer has better performance than Flashplayer in a web browser, especially on older PCs.
• MKV support.
• Exact search.
• Built-in support for VAAPI and VDA. Improved VDPAU.
• Better screenshot support.
• Filters. Many video and audio filters: deinterlacing, post processing, noise removal... and even a karaoke filter (voice removal).
• Mouse rewind. You can use the mouse wheel to fast forward or rewind in the video. Mouse button customization is also supported.
• The video equalizer allows you to adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and gamma of the video image.
• Multiple playback speed.
• Sound and subtitles Adjust the delay. Allows you to synchronize audio and subtitles.
• Advanced settings, such as selecting a demultiplexer or video & audio codecs.
• Ability to search and download subtitles from opensubtitles.org.
• Ability to play YouTube videos. YouTube Browser included.
• Translations: SMPlayer is now translated into more than 30 languages, including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese….
• Ability to change the style and set of interface icons.
• Supports 2 in 1 devices with touch screens
• Ability to display video on external screens
• Free and open source. SMPlayer is distributed under the GPL license.
• New option “Display information on OSD” in View -> OSD View (Shift + I). It displays information about the current file (resolution, bitrate) on the OSD.
• More options for managing the playlist in Settings -> Playlist, what does easier to use playlists for bookmarks.
• Bug fixes and more...

Install SMPlayer 16.11 on Ubuntu 16.04/16.10, Linux mint 18

To install this video player on your system, open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and enter/copy the following commands

Sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer sudo apt update sudo apt install smplayer smtube smplayer-themes smplayer-skins mpv

After installation, find SMPlayer in the application menu and enjoy watching videos.

Do you use this video player? Write what you think about him.

Hi, I don't know much about video player or codecs etc and I'm trying to squeeze the best quality picture out of Mplayer (I'm using the SMplayer interface).

My questions: should I enable post-processing (I don't know what it is, but it looks like it might improve the quality) and direct rendering? (also looks like it might improve the quality) can anyone explain what they do?.

Regarding the output driver, I use vdpau, is this best for cards?

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Thank you.

Using vdpau with Nvidia cards vdpau should give you excellent performance using smplayer and will ensure that you use very little CPU when playing DVDs and x264 encoded videos. As has been discussed in detail on the Ubuntu forums, very important note that

Vdpau is two things. One is a display device such as xv. Another is a codec that can use the PureVideo chip to decode certain files

such as mpeg1/2 and x264. If your card supports it (see here for list of supported gpus), it is the best option than the old xv, and especially xll, which will use significantly more CPU.

There are some options in smplayer that can be accessed using the configure button next to the vdpau option (see screenshot), but you usually don't have to mess with them unless you have video performance issues.

NOTE. Especially important note that when vdpau codecs are vdpau such as ffh264vdpau , no one of the following smplayer gui options such as post-processing , deinterlace etc will not have any effect. In the screenshot you can also see that "disable filters software" is checked when pressing vdpau properties.

However, as noted in the Mplayer manual, special options such as deint can be passed on the command line when using vdpau, although this is not usually required; these special options are not supported in smplayer gui.

Vdpau (with -vc ffmpeg12vdpau, ffwmv3vdpau, ffvc1vdpau, ffh264vdpau or ffodivxvdpau) Video output that uses VDPAU to decode video via hardware. Also supports displaying of software-decoded video. sharpen=<-1-1>For positive values, apply a sharpening algorithm to the video, for negative values ​​a blurring algorithm (de- fault: 0). denoise=<0-1>Apply a noise reduction algorithm to the video (default: 0, no noise reduction). deint=<0-4>Select the deinterlacer (default: 0). All modes > 0 re- spect -field-dominance.

As shown on this forum,

Deint is an option for the video out (vdpau) not for the codec

and so to specify one of these special options (where vo is the video output and vc is the video codec), you can use the following command (taken from the forum above):

Mplayer -vo vdpau:deint=1 -vc ffh264vdpau 00007.MTS

Thus, when using vdpau you really not need to worry about these special parameters or any other settings in the smplayer gui such as post-processing or direct rendering that you normally cannot apply when using vdpau .

To contribute to Mick's answer, you can use vdpau in smplayer and enable deinterlacing by adding arguments command line in the SMPlayer settings menu.

Settings > Advanced > Options for MPlayer

In the Options field, add the required command line arguments. For example

So, we have installed all the necessary drivers and libraries, now we need to install the player and configure everything.

First you need to install it if you don’t already have it installed. For me personally, this player is the only one and there are no others; it is very convenient.
In Ubuntu it is in the official repositories

sudo apt-get install smplayer

Setting up SMPlayer

Settings → Performance → Allow frame drops— turn it off.
Settings → Performance → Decoding streams— set the value equal to the number of cores of your processor.

You can also disable the loop filter, but this will affect the quality:
Settings → Performance → Loop filter → Skip (always).

Disabling double buffering may improve performance but cause subtitles to flicker:
Settings → General → Video → Double Buffering— turn it off.
This alone is enough for smooth playback on computers with a multi-core processor.

But it’s better to use a video card.
Settings → General → Video → Output Device select vdpau.

But as it turned out, for some reason he did not want to show some video files. I remembered that when using vdpau you need to specify some parameters. You need to enter them in the settings, section "Additionally", tab "mplayer/mpv options". in the very first line "Settings:"

Vo vdpau -vc ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,

with a comma at the end.

As an example, I will show the CPU load using vdpau and without it.

Hardware decoding disabled

Hardware decoding enabled

As we can see, even on a small clip the difference is quite noticeable, and if you include a movie larger than 10GB in size, the difference will be even greater.

That's all, you can safely watch movies with hellish high resolution, and nothing will load or lag :)

It is a powerful video player for Linux and Windows based on MPlayer that has an endless number of features and options. Together with VLC, it makes a pair of absolute favorites in its class.

In this article I will look at the main advantages that allow us to talk about SMPlayer as one of the best programs in your class. SMPlayer is written in Qt 4.8 and uses MPlayer2 to play videos. Personally, I can only find words of praise for it, which is why I decided to write this review. Let's look at the main features of SMPlayer.

Huge number of supported formats

SMPlayer can play all formats supported by MPlayer, such as AVI, MKV or MPG. In addition, SMPlayer can play DVDs, Blu-ray discs, as well as DVDs in ISO image format or copied to a hard drive, while recognizing the DVD folder structure. X11, Xv, OpenGL, VESA, and some others can be used as an output driver.

Theme support

The appearance of the main window can be customized using various skins, which can be changed in the program settings. In addition, there is a “compact” mode, which removes the toolbar and simplifies the program interface.

Using the Noiae Icon Theme:
Saving a Stop Point and Resuming Playback

SMPlayer is able to remember settings for current file. If you then close the program and open the same file again, playback will continue from the same place, with the same volume level. The player window size for the current file is also saved.

Image scaling and adjustment

You can scale the frame size, change the aspect ratio, and also apply various filters to the video:

Video equalizer allows you to change contrast, brightness, saturation, lightness and gamma.
Audio effects

Some audio effects are also available, such as karaoke or normalization:
File information

Extended file information, including encoding algorithm, container, resolution, duration, and so on:
Searching for subtitles on the Internet

SMPlayer has the option to search and download subtitles on the Internet from OpenSubtitles.org.
Playlist settings

The built-in playlist in SMPlayer can be attached to the main window, or displayed in a separate child window of the program. The program provides the ability to create, save and download playlists.
The playlist can be attached to any side of the main window (including top or bottom).


Setting options

Almost anything can be configured in the program's "Preferences" dialog box: the order in which subtitles are used, video and audio options, system tray integration, interface, hotkeys, updates, and so on: