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I have installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my Surface pro 3 and I have installed i965-va-driver and libva-intel-vaapi-driver to take advantage of vaapi driver for video acceleration decoding. Then I have installed mplayer-vaapi as suggested on this link:
Vaapi not working in Ubuntu 13.04

Using vaapi driver to decode and play h264 stream, mplayer shows artifacts about once every 5 to 10 sec, as a partially "green frame" (frame with a green stripe across it, of varying height, sometimes most of the frame, sometimes much less).
MPlayer log shows messages e.g. "RTP: missed 2 packets". I also noticed that with vaapi enabled, I cannot use multithreading with libavcodec (lavdopts threads=N), from forum discussions this seems expected. In that case, what else can I do to increase RTP receive and H.264 decode speed?

My MPlayer command line:

mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi -benchmark -v -msglevel all=9 br60.sdp

Thank you, Harshal Patel HPC Systems Engineer Signalogic Inc.

Image displaying artifacts: enter image description here

Image displaying error messages: enter image description here


Update to the question:

I used command cat /proc/net/udp and it showed me result,

sl  local_address rem_address   st tx_queue rx_queue tr tm->when retrnsmt   uid  timeout inode ref pointer drops                  
 1235: 00000000:B000 00000000:0000 07 00000000:00000000 00:00000000 00000000     0        0 57854 2 ffff8800a5b35e00 4256  

Here, drop packets = 4256
So whenever I see artifacts on MPlayer, I am seeing drops packet counter getting increased whether I use vaapi or multi-threaded x86 decoder.

How can I prevent Linux Network Stack from dropping frames? Is there Ubuntu driver upgrade or patch for this?

Surface tablet was connected to internet using WiFi, If I connect it with LAN, I am not seeing any packet loss or any artifacts while playing the stream.

So how can I increase Wireless throughput on tablet?

NOTE:

I am using VAAPI for -vo(video output) and -va(video acceleration) in MPlayer.

1 Answer 1

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I also see MPlayer artifacts streaming 720p to a Surface Pro 3 with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, but without using vaapi, instead using -lavdopts threads=4 (x86 multithreaded H.264 decode). The artifact is not a "green frame", but looks like it occurs with similar rate and frame position as described.

I was able to get improved results by turning off Network Manager, as noted here:

How can I completely remove NetworkManager?

I first noticed this because every 30 sec, or sometimes every 1 minute or 2 minutes, the entire Surface user interface would lock up for a few sec... the interval varied, yet it was not random either. That led me to investigate WiFi scanning... which led to Network Manager.

(My apologies if this answer shows twice. I first posted it two (2) weeks ago and it still has not appeared. I hope it's not due to the effect of NetworkManager on RTP video streaming. I realize there is some debate among Ubuntu developers regarding whether disabling of NetworkManager should be a do-able thing or not, but please don't blame me, I'm just a messenger).

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