Uninterruptable MP3 playback on 060/PPC?

[quenthal]

When I'm playing MP3-files on background while browsing wih Aweb, it makes MP3-playback stuttering for a short period.

I checked his with SnoopDos, an noticed that when it interrupted playback, Aweb was reading/writing those small cache-files like mad. This is correct, since interrupts happen with pictureheavy pages, like a.org, aw.net, which have many small pictures (smilies, avatars etc.), especially if i'm restoring iconified aweb-windows.

I have tried the following:

- Completely using Ram-drive as Aweb's only cache-directory - same issue.

- Playing MP3's direcly from Ram-drive

- Using max-buffers with players (best so far has been AmigaAmp with 1sec playbuffer, it seems that loadbuffers do not matter in this issue).

- Gave max. priorities for players, while lowering aweb's, with an without executive

- used different versions of mpega.library

- intresting thing was 060version of mpega - naturally it made aweb much slower,but it did not interrupt playback at all, however i didn't test it very throughly.


My system: A4k, Mediator (NIC10/100, SB128), CSPPC200/060, AOS3.9, WarpDT for pics.

[Matt_H]

The problem is that mpega decoding saps the CPU. Drive access and image decoding will need some CPU power, and so mpeg playback is not that consistent.

The solutions I can think of are:
-Use a PPC mpega.library (which may not help much due to context switching)
-Drop the quality of the mpeg decoding. AmigaAMP and AMPLifier both have settings for this.
-Use a hardware mpeg decoder like Delfina, Prelude w/ MPEGit module, or MAS-Pro. There's probably others too, but those are the most common.

The third option will produce the best results, but is the hardest to implement due to availability and pricing of said hardware.

[Kraftwerk]

What I did with my Cyberstorm PPC was to buffer the entire file so that there is no disk access during playback. Try that.

[nOw2]

What player are you using ?

With Songplayer, MP3 plays skip free on my 060/PPC - using it right now. Although I use IBrowse rather than AWeb.

AmiNetRadio has always played broken sound under load, no matter how I much I play with the task priorities.

It could be AWeb that's the problem. If I remember correctly, one of its selling points is that it runs under input.device, which would mean a priority on GUI updates of 20.

Try Songplayer anyway, might be the solution.

[Merc]

I second the vote for SongPlayer, you can buffer big chunks of the file into RAM which makes it pretty skip-free unless you have heavy load for 30 seconds or however long you set the buffer to be.  I could usually browse while playing MP3's and not have it break up unless I visited a really complicated site.

BTW I just set up my 1200 again and for some reason SongPlayer won't play any MP3s; it loads them and looks like it's going to play, but it just sits at the start of the file and doesn't do anything.  Has anyone else run into this??

[quenthal]

@all

Thanks again for help. :-)

When using other browsers than AWeb, everything worked fine with almost any MP3-player.

SongPlayer gave good results even when browsing with AWeb heavy pages. So I would say that the fault is with AWeb and on it's way to handle cache.

[quenthal]

Merc wrote:

BTW I just set up my 1200 again and for some reason SongPlayer won't play any MP3s; it loads them and looks like it's going to play, but it just sits at the start of the file and doesn't do anything.  Has anyone else run into this??

Make sure you're using correct mpega.library and there is nothing wrong with the AHI-device's settings you are using. Have you tried other players and do they give the same issues?

[Framiga]

have you tryed the WOS version of mpega.library?

No problems at all with SongPlayer 1.62 and YAM, IB and Amigift running in the mainwhile.

With Aweb (latest release) the load is much more.

EDIT the WOS libmad version, is no more present in the latest archive.

Contact me privately if you want it.

[quenthal]

Framiga wrote:
have you tryed the WOS version of mpega.library?

Tried with many different PPC-versions of it with same issues.

No problems at all with SongPlayer 1.62 and YAM, IB and Amigift running in the mainwhile.

Yes, the solution was either using SongPlayer when using AWeb, or altogether different browser than AWeb

With Aweb (latest release) the load is much more.

EDIT the WOS libmad version, is no more present in the latest archive.

Contact me privately if you want it.

Thanks for the offer, but I already got that one from you few weeks ago  :-D

[Framiga]

The problem is AWeb.

The 68K version (above all the latest) is quite unusable . . . at least compared with IB2.3

IMHO the author's target, is definiyely OS4 with faster processors.

[quenthal]

I decided to give a try for AmigaAmp's internal WarpOS decoder. Quality might differ from mpega.library, but sound is consistent and there is not interrupts even under heavy load from aweb or elsewhere. I no longer remember why I didn't use it from the beginning. Might have been quality issues.

[Karlos]

I always found the internal warpup decoder better quality, especially since you could use the graphic eq...