New Mplayer slows down AVCHD footage

I’ve built the latest mplayer trunk (r29664) in order being able to play back 3gp videos with sound. All was fine and my 3gp videos had sound after I’ve installed the appropriate libraries, built and compiled the current mplayer version.
But after a while I’ve noticed, that mplayer, no matter how I’ve invoked it (with or without my mplayer-vdpau wrapper script for My Media System), played back my AVCHD footage from my Canon HF100 in slow motion (e.g. half speed), and the sound of course wasn’t in sync either.
After I’ve played around with a few different switches, I’ve discovered, that the ‘-fps 50‘ switch is now obsolete, and one have to use the ‘-correct-pts‘ switch now (and if I recall correctly: again).

So let’s assume you have Nvidia-vdpau installed (default since Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope ) and you old mplayer command line was like this:

Bad example:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -fps 50 my-avchd-footage-here.mts

Good example:
mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -correct-pts my-avchd-footage-here.mts

I knew, that something had to be done about this situation. It’s very annoying being forced to supply a special switch, only for being able to play back something so common like an AVCHD (H.264) encoded video. So the ‘-fps 50/60‘ switch surely wasn’t the solution, but – hey – ‘-correct-pts‘ ain’t either! Actually I was hoping no additional switch at all will be necessary one fine day, but as it seems, I’ll have to wait a bit longer.

And the most annoying part for me is, that this whole Blog, since its beginning was always referring to ‘-fps 50/60‘! I’m not using the most resent VDPAU version from Nvidia, so there might be a chance, it’s working out of the box now together with a current VDPAU version.

Feedback more than welcome!

3 thoughts on “New Mplayer slows down AVCHD footage

  1. You’ve got a typo saying “-corrent-pts”. (Not much of a feedback, but hey, you asked!)

    I’m not using the latest mplayer and no reason to upgrade, so for now I guess I’ll stick with -fps 50 for avchd. But good to keep this in mind for later.

  2. THANK YOU! I’ve been wondering for quite a while why -fps didn’t seem to have any effect on my AVCHD files, despite the man page still describing it as being an override.

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