Fedora 17 - Video playback

[Johan73]

Hi,

I recently upgraded my netbook (Acer Aspire One D255 with a Atom N550 and 2GB of RAM) to 64-bit Fedora 17, and I am noticing a huge drop in video playback quality. It used to be smooth with F16, but now playback is lagged and jumping. I have some people mentioning that Atom processors should have graphics problems in 64-bit mood, but I noticed no such thing when I was running F16 64-bit.

Are there any known solutions to this problem?

I also note that I (in the System Monitor) have an unsually high processor load, about 80%, even when no programs are loaded and no work is being done by the computer. I suspect that these two issues are related, there not being enough processor power for proper video decoding and playback.

[george_toolan]

Try top to find out which process is using the CPU and how much memory is being used.

With only 20% CPU left video playback would be jumpy.

Note: with only 2 GiB memory there is no advantage in installing a 64 bit operating system.

[DBelton]

There are several advantages to installing a 64 bit OS even if you don't have more than 4GB of RAM.

One example is that you get more general purpose registers than you do in the 32 bit version, which can give a little performance boost if data can fit in the registers instead of having to retrieve it from cache or main memory.

Another is addressing space available to memory map files into.

Video decoders utilize the extra registers and video playback is much smoother when using a 64bit kernel over a 32 bit one, even if you don't have over 4GB of RAM.

[QuantumKnot]

What video player are you using? Totem is becoming worser and worser since Fedora 16 onwards.

[Johan73]

I have used VLC and Totem, and none of them works.

What I see when I use top is that the CPU is working at relatively low capacity, but when I start System Monitor or any program using animations, the processor load jumps to almost max. As far as I can see the problem seems to be related to the graphics and animations (System Monitor uses animations to show processor load over time).

It seems to be a Fedora thing, because when I installed 64-bit openSuSE on an old netbook that I have, with a Atom N450 processor, video playback ran smooth and without problems.

Also, it is my understanding that the processor itself gets a performance boost from running 64 rather than 32 bits, and whith an Atom that seems worthwhile. It would be interesting to hear from someone who actually knows about this.

[QuantumKnot]

Have you tried gnome-mplayer? You can choose different video outputs (Xv, vdpau, vaapi), which may use less resources.

[Johan73]

I will, but that is not really the problem. I think that a N550 dual core processor should be able to do what a single core N450 processor does. This was not a problem before the upgrade to F17, but it is now.

And i forgot to mention that it is gnome-shell that consumes a lot of the processor power as soon as I open an application with some animation in, whether System Monitor or VLC.

[QuantumKnot]

The GPU plays a role too since gnome 3 is based on clutter, which uses OpenGL. Totem uses clutter now and I've noticed it to use more CPU than gnome-mplayer, which uses XVideo.

[Johan73]

I tried KDE, and while I see a marked improvement it is still far from good.

[Johan73]

I think that I have solved it. It seems that a plugin was not allowed to load, and by running the recommended commands

# grep plugin-containe /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M mypol
# semodule -i mypol.pp

I got video to work properly.

It seems to have been a file named cert8.db