Multimedia

XBMC for Tegra with full HW acceleration

tuomas
XBMC at UltraHD resolution.
XBMC running at UltraHD resolution on Jetson TK1.

Thanks to Markus Tavenrath there is finally a fully accelerated Kodi (previously known as XBMC) for Tegra K1 based devices like the Jetson TK1. Some of the Kodi patches are already upstreamed and the rest will be hopefully soon. Jetson supports X.Org very well and things like XRandR based TV refresh rate changes work perfectly.

I have a simple lab power supply (Mastech DF17132) and I made some quick power measurements with it. I did only guestimate the typical reading instead of making multiple tests and calculating the averages. So the numbers should be close to the truth but not scientifically accurate. I replaced the power supply that came with the Jetson with the lab power, so I have not included the consumption of the Jetson’s external power supply in the measurements.

The on-demand CPU frequency governor does not provide proper CPU clocks for smooth Kodi UI and video playback, so all the Kodi tests have been run with all four CPU cores forced on-line and with performance governor.

My USB hub, USB keyboard and USB mouse consume about 0.84W. The very noisy fan takes about 0.72W. That is about 1.5W that is included in the numbers below but maybe should not as everybody use different USB devices and nobody can use that fan in an HTPC setup.

In full screen video test cases the TV’s refresh rate has been changed to 24Hz and when the XBMC UI is visible, the refresh rate is 60Hz for 1080p TV and 30Hz for 2160p TV (HDMI 1.4 limitation).

1920×1080 Sony TV
Test case Power consumption
Slim Login 3.36
XFCE desktop, idle, ondemand 3.36
XFCE desktop, idle, performance 3.72
Kodi main menu 5.40
Kodi full screen video 1080p24 5.16
Kodi full screen video 1080p60 6.00
Kodi full screen video 2160p24 5.40

In the table below, the resolution used for all the cases is Ultra HD or 2160p or 3840×2160. The term “4k” is misleading as people often really mean the Ultra HD and not for example 4096×2160.

3840×2160 LG TV
Test case Power consumption
XFCE desktop, idle, ondemand 3.72
XFCE desktop, idle, performance 4.08
Kodi main menu 5.52
Kodi full screen video 1080p24 (max gpu clocks) 6.96
Kodi full screen video 2160p24 (max gpu clocks) 6.96

I think decoding 1080p24 with 5.16W (or 3.7W without USB peripherals and the fan) is pretty good! Add 2 watts and you get 2160p.

After watching different trailers over and over I definitely would like to see movies being produced at higher FPS rates and distributed at higher bitrates instead of bumping the resolution from Full HD to Ultra HD. That 1080p60 looked awesome.

The biggest complaint I have about the Jetson, is the fan. The noise is way too loud even for development use, not to mention using Jetson as an HTPC in the living room. There is some discussion about using passive coolers in the NVIDIA forums.

For installation instructions and other tips see the Installing Kodi wiki page.

Ubuntu on Ouya

tuomas

[Update 2014-09-20]: The latest patches from Markus for the Jetson TK1 work also for Tegra3!

I was testing Markus Tavenrath’s EGL branch of the XBMC on my Ouya and noticed that OMX_UseEGLImage segfaults on Debian but doesn’t on Ubuntu. The segfault happens inside the NVIDIA’s OMX binary, so there is not much to debug. And with Ubuntu 13.10 I had rendering issues. Then I tried Debian Jessie just to discover it is already using X.Org Video ABI 15.

So here is the summary of my discoveries:

  • Debian Wheezy: Segfault in OMX_UseEGLImage with XBMC.
  • Debian Jessie: X.Org Video ABI 15, no driver.
  • Ubuntu 12.04: Old.
  • Ubuntu 12.10: Old.
  • Ubuntu 13.04: No obvious issues.
  • Ubuntu 13.10: X.Org Video ABI 14, rendering problems.
  • Ubuntu 14.04: X.Org Video ABI 15, no driver.
HW accelerated video and GLES2.
HW accelerated video and GLES2.

I noticed that Totem has moved to GStreamer 1.0 so it does not use NVIDIA’s GStreamer plugins. I changed Parole to use nvxvimagesink instead of the de-facto xvimagesink and it works well. I’ve uploaded the binary to my tmp.

Pulseaudio seemed to cause slow playback and extra CPU consumption so I just removed it.

My instructions for creating Ubuntu Raring rootfs for Ouya can be found from github. Do leave a comment if there is anything broken with the instructions!

Debian on Ouya: All Systems Go

tuomas

I finally got all the major subsystems working and Debian is now usable on Ouya. I prefer Debian but Ubuntu should work similarly.

Working video and 3D

In the above screenshot I’m playing 1080p H264 while running glmark2-es, an OpenGL ES benchmark. And the CPUFreq ondemand governor doesn’t even raise the CPU frequency from the minimum as everything is properly accelerated. I do have to admit that the 1080p video isn’t running smoothly with the benchmark running at the same time.

A disclaimer before telling more: Trying this out might void the warranty and flashing anything to Ouya may easily brick it forever. So don’t try it, unless you are willing to buy a new one.

That said, the idea is not to touch Ouya’s Android at all. Kernel is booted from RAM and Debian from an SD card or USB stick.

The instructions for debootstrapping your own Debian Wheezy rootfs are described in the github repository and the needed binaries are in a temporary location that will probably change at some point.

WiFi is working as well but I’m not sure if the firmware binaries are redistributable, so you need to copy them from the Android rootfs after booting to Debian.

One of my main goals for this whole exercise is video encoding and I’m happy to say that H264 encoding from an USB webcam works nicely with hardware acceleration as well.

I’ve also noticed some issues:

  • Hciconfig doesn’t show BT devices, I didn’t debug much further.
  • Mpg123 seems to play but nothing is heard. Maybe it tries to pass MP3 onwards instead of PCM? GStreamer provides acceleration for MP3 and AAC though.
  • Video acceleration works only with GStreamer and nvxvimagesink. Mplayer can’t even use XV video output correctly.
  • Tegra3 supports only OpenGL ES 2.0 with EGL, so no full OpenGL with GLX.
  • Xrandr seems to be able to switch the resolution but after the switch there was window decoration corruption.

Despite the deficiencies I think Tegra3 is quite well supported in the X.Org world and many things work well with this 99$ device.

If you test my instructions, let me know how it goes and what you think about it! :)

Pleco Phase01 completed

tuomas

I started playing with microcontrollers in 2005 and, if not at the very start, at least very quickly I decided to aim to have some sort of remote controlled Linux device with controllable camera with digital wireless communication. Now, 6 years later, I have completed my first phase :)

Couple of photos of the earlier devices are shown in the project page.

After several planning iterations and code rewrites I ended up using Qt both on the remote controlled Gumstix and on the GUI controller. I decided that trying to optimize everything from the memory and CPU consumption to the network bandwidth just isn’t worth the time spent in implementing it. The most CPU intensive task is the video encoding to H263 and that’s done in the DSP. I’m running MeeGo on the Gumstix and it provides e.g. the GStreamer plugins for the DSP.

Using Qt framework with self made simple protocol over UDP I got the Phase01 code implemented quite quickly compared to my previous efforts. The protocol allows low priority packets (like periodic statistics and video stream) to be lost and guarantees the passing of high priority packets (control commands etc.). Also only the latest control command of each type is retransmitted, i.e. an old packet is not retransmitted if a new overriding command has already been given.

The controller GUI shows the states the slave sends, like motor speeds, WLAN signal strength, CPU load average and some protocol statistics like round trip time and the number of retransmissions.

Currently the motors are controlled using the a,s,d,w keys in 10% steps and the camera is controlled dragging the mouse left button pressed on top of the video window.

Here’s a video (direct link) of the Phase01. You need HTML5 video capable browser with Ogg Theora/Vorbis codecs.

New UI for Kilikali

tuomas

Thanks to Movial Kilikali got a modern UI and looks quite nice now:

Kilikali UI

Kilikali development has moved to a GIT tree (branch generic-2) hosted by linux.onarm.com.

Although the UI got improved and the playback on n8x0 got fixes there are still some bigger task to be done. E.g. adding single files, adding directories recursively and skipping unknown media types. Integration with Light Media Scanner has also been discussed.

Ogg-support: Issues

tuomas

The ogg-support is listed as the The Pearl for OS2008, thanks! :)

Even though the ogg-support has got nice ratings in the download page, it doesn’t work perfectly on the OS2008. Most of the issues has some sort of workaround so I decided to make a summary post of them.

Ogg-support breaks VOIP calls

Ogg-support adds Speex voice codec to the system and it seems that the VOIP client advertises it as the first choice. If both parties have it installed, it’s selected. But. The VOIP engine (or whatever) doesn’t know or just refuses to use Speex, so the VOIP stream is not actually sent, properly at least.

If you delete the Speex’ GStreamer plugin, the calls seems to work nicely.

Bug report (#2811).

All Oggs from Map are listed in Media Player

The Metalayer Crawler adds all known media files to the Media Player’s Library. With ogg-support also Ogg files are recognized and added to the Library. Problem is that the Map application includes almost 2000 Oggs with N810 so they are added to the Library too.

A workaround is mentioned in the ogg-support’s help forum. It requires editing the SQL database after the files are added to the Library.

Bug report (#2772).

File Manager doesn’t launch Media Player for Oggs

I had to modify the mime type XML a bit to get File Manager to recognize videos and audios in Ogg container separately instead of just showing all *.ogg files as e.g. audio/x-vorbis. To be specific I had to remove the *.ogg pattern from the XML file.

It seems that the hildon_mime_open_file() in libhildonmime doesn’t launch the file without the *.ogg pattern tag in XML.

No workaround for this one.

Bug report (#2521).

PS. Many problems are reported in the Internet Tablet Talk’s forums. I don’t follow those frequently so please notify me in the garage’s forums about possible bugs, issues or workarounds. I do get a instant mail notification about those. Thanks.

Ogg-support 0.4: Media Player

tuomas

I added initial support for the built-in Media Player. It’s untrivial to get everything working properly as the FileManager, the Metalayer Crawler, and the Media Player are all close source applications and their behaviour is not really documented anywhere.

The change log:

  • Added OGG support for the built-in media player.
  • Updated ogg related mime types from freedesktop.org.xml (excluding *.ogg patterns).
  • Added icons for the new mime types.
  • Removed dependency to floating point vorbis library.

Known issues:

  • The FM doesn’t now how to start the new mime types.
  • The Metalayer Crawler doesn’t fill in the meta data (artist etc.) for the ogg files.
  • I removed the *.ogg patterns from the mime file because with it neither the FM nor the Crawler checked the real mime type for files but just put the first mime type with *.ogg pattern.

The Crawler did fill in the artist etc. for my ogg files at one point, but I don’t know why. If you have any hints for these issues, I’m all ears :)

PS. The MP now plays oggs with Theora video and Vorbis audio too :)

Ogg-support 0.2: Speex

tuomas

The 0.2 release includes dependency to the Speex (libspeex1 and the corresponding gst plugin in gstreamer0.10-plugins-good-kulve). The Speex is compiled from SVN trunk.

I made some light (just looked the numbers, no playback) performance tests. The two tables below show how much time in seconds it took to encode a 60 second audio clip (8000Hz, mono, 16bit). The first column shows the complexity used (scale is 0-10) and the rest of the columns show the encoding time with different qualities (0-10).

no VBR, no DTX, no VAD:

c/q      1       2       3       5       7
0       12       8      10      14      11
1       12       9      10      15      11
2       13       8      12      16      16
3       13      10      15      22      19
4       13      10      16      23      20

VBR, DTX, VAD:

c/q      1       2       3       5       7
0       10      10      11      14      16
1        9      10      13      14      16
2       10      12      13      15      18
3       11      13      15      19      22
4       11      13      17      20      24

The next table shows the difference between fixed point and floating point versions.

c        fixed     float
0        11        17
1        11        18
2        13        20
3        19        29

So, use the fixed point Speex API, if possible (the gst doesn’t use it). If using the floating point API, the libspeex will make the conversion.

For VoIP a good quality setting could be quality 7, complexity 2 and VBR, VAD, and DTX on.

Ogg support for n800

tuomas

The Internet Tablets don’t support Ogg natively, so there has been some open source projects to add it. I made yet another one.

Features:

  • Adds application/ogg and audio/x-ogg mime types
  • Add GnomeVFS mime type icons for above
  • Depends on ogg, vorbis and theora libs and on the corresponding GStreamer plugins

See project page, home page or install it (conflicts with kilikali-codecs-meta).

For an open source player, see kilikali.