H264 profile 10 videos very laggy both in vlc and in mpv

aquasp

I did a download of some videos, but I am unable to reproduce them smooth. Mpv runs fine any other video, but seems to ignore --hwdec=vaapi for me. My friend tried on his windows and it seems to work fine in windows media player. In a live usb with Pop_OS I tried too, but the result was the same in solus. Is there anything that I can do about this file?

aleksvor

If you don't have powerful enough CPU, then probably not. 10-bit H264 isn't a common industry format (unfortunately, it got popular only in the anime crowd, and they are already moving towards 10-bit HEVC), and thus virtually no GPU has hardware support for it, that's why VAAPI doesn't work here. Basically, you don't have any options except software decoding for such videos, so powerful CPU is a strict requirement here.

But I see that you use gpu-hq profile in mpv, which is geared towards powerful PCs and turns on some pretty demanding settings. Maybe you can try less demanding profile?

aquasp

aleksvor Hmm, thanks. What profiles can I try? I switched to gpu-hq because the default was opengl-hq and they said that it was deprecated.

aleksvor

aquasp I think you can try either the default profile (balanced between quality and performance, just omit the --profile option) or, if this doesn't help, --profile=sw-fast which tries to use software output with settings for fast decoding and processing.