Jetson Tk1: mp4 video playback quality from Canon camera recorded videos

I did some small videos with a Canon Powershot S120 and the recorded videos look
awful (independend of resolution) when played on Jetson Tk1 with most video players.

  • issues: videos show artifacts and are distorted
    (playback with totem, mplayer2+smplayer, nvgstplayer)

  • playback on x86 PC is ok

  • playback on Jetson with stock XBMC 12.3 from Ubuntu 14.04 is ok

Could it be a problem with hardware video decoding ?

Have you tried playing it in Kodi build for jetson which supports hw decoding?

Hi peba,

One of the things to also check is the type of encoding that the video is using. You can check this through the file properties dialog box. Also, the size of the video is important if the encoding format is not hardware supported on the Jetson. Of course, sample files are always good too …

There is two different things that affects the output: decoding and rendering. And they are often not dependent of each other. For rendering there is XVideo extension and OpenGL or OpenGL ES / EGL.

E.g. mplayer2 does SW decoding on Jetson while nvgstplayer does HW decoding (depending on the codec). mplayer2 probably tries to use XV for the rendering and for nvgstplayer there are multiple options. XBMC 12.3 uses SW decoding and OpenGL rendering. The latest Kodi from my PPA uses HW decoding and OpenGL ES / EGL rendering.

Often a photo of the display is better for explaining what kind of artifacts there are.

Currently this gstreamer Oneliner found in an other thread here gives me the best result for mp4 playback compared to all other players and methods:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=“$1” ! qtdemux name=demux demux.video_00 ! queue ! nv_omx_h264dec ! nv_omx_hdmi_videosink