Video playback raspberry pi

ARM Technical Assistance
1

Hello, I am having a problem with video playback. I am using a Pi 4b 1GB. I am installing through the RPI imager program.

In the XFCE edition, fullscreen playback in mpv is great. I can’t however seem to replicate this in the minimal edition. I install xorg and mpv, go to play a video and find noticeable screen tearing. I had similar troubles with Raspbian but thought that maybe it was because they ship with VLC and don’t “support” mpv or something. I also tried both 32 bit and 64 bit Raspbian, so I don’t think that is the problem. I also tried using picom, and though I don’t think it helps, even if it did I know it will impact performance enough that playback will still be poor, but in a different way.

I know this is a niche problem, but what is annoying me is I know it can work because it does with a pre-installed desktop, I just can’t recreate it when I install everything myself.

2

Check memory usage (with htop or free at the command line). 1GB could be borderline.

1 Like
3

All of our arm images ship with zswap-arm arm installed. It particularly useful with 1G ram devices.

sudo pacman -S zswap-arm
sudo sytemctl enable zswap-arm
sudo reboot

You need to post your /boot/config.txt so we can see what else is going on.

1 Like
4

With the video and htop side by side, it seems the cpu is getting hit harder than the memory. Mem usage is around 700M while when lots of subtitles are on screen cpu gets to pretty much 100% (all threads). I know that’s because of software decoding and I’m okay with that.

Zswap-arm is already running. I’m using the default config.txt but I’ll show it anyway (btw I’ve tried kms doesn’t fix it and breaks audio)

initramfs initramfs-linux.img followkernel
kernel=kernel8.img
arm_64bit=1
disable_overscan=1

dtparam=audio=on

dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
max_framebuffers=2
disable_splash=1