Hi, I am looking for the proper “qubes way” to have decent video playback performance inside a qube (DispVM or AppVM). I am aware of the lack of hardware video acceleration in Qubes OS. What I have tried so far: mpv mplayer vlc playing a file in browser (Firefox or Tor Browser) Results (on a 2K…

[image] qubist: mpv - worse Try mpv --vo=x11 --profile=sw-fast --vo=x11 is the most important part.

I’m sure you’ve tried this, but just for completeness’ sake: assigning all CPU cores and enough RAM to the VM in which the video is supposed to be played, as well as playing it “locally”, i.e. the video file resides in that VM is going to improve performance. Note that if the number of assigned core…

This is what worked for me in fedora-38 template: Install these packages, one line per command # install vlc vlc-extras python3-vlc vlc-core vlc-devel phonon-qt5-backend-vlc libvlcpp-devel # install pulseaudio-qubes --allowerasing # install qubes-audio-daemon As for browser, brave works best for …

Thanks for the info! @Bearillo Re. “locally” and the rest: the whole DispVM is in RAM, including the MP4 file. So, that should not be a bottleneck. I am reading the man page of qvm-prefs which says: vcpus Accepted values: no of CPUs Number of CPU (cores) available to VM. S…

@tempmail I am running a minimal debian template. From the packages you recommend, I have only pulseaudio-qubes and it seems sufficient for mpv. What is “–allowerasing” for?

Good question, I didn’t even know about that warning :smile: For me it definitely improves playback if I assign more cores to the VM and I’ve so far always used disposables for playback (setting the core number higher in the dvm-template beforehand…one could also create a separate dvm-template for …

[image] qubist: Without --profile=sw-fast (only --vo=x11) mpv is still not so good. Ah, you’re probably on Debian 11? That would explain it, because I just noticed that before Debian 12 they used to build mpv without the zimg library for scaling, and --profile=sw-fast seems to make a bigger d…

@Bearillo What is your CPU? @rustybird I am on Debian 12 minimal (cloned + mpv installed). Enjoy, mpv is awesome. It is! I have enjoyed it on GPU accelerated Linux distros. Now, on Qubes OS too :slight_smile:

i7-1260P, so 12 physical cores and I’m not using SMT, but Turbo is on, though the cores do scale very well (using hwp). I noticed early on that having only 1 or 2 cores for a VM would lead to the laptop running hot and the fans being loud quite often, presumably because those cores then go to P1 and…

Interesting. 2 vcpus work fine on the much weaker CPU here with the mpv settings @rustybird shared.

Huh…I guess I gotta give mpv a try then! Edit: ok wow so mpv even without the two aforementioned options is already 20% lower in CPU usage than totem and with the two options it’s a whopping 4 times better! (uses 4-5 times less CPU as per qubes widget) And all without any noticeable drop in qualit…

Improving video playback speed?

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rustybird November 8, 2023, 4:22pm 3

Try mpv --vo=x11 --profile=sw-fast

--vo=x11 is the most important part.

Playing videos in VMs lags

Why is parole media player included in fedora template if it contains no codecs?