PowerPC Media Center 7.2.1 - Now With The Latest FFplay Media Player For All Macs Running Mac OS X 10.3.9+

[alex_free]

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ppc-media-center-7x-youtube-streamer-downloader-convertor

After weeks of development and generous testing by @RogerWilco6502 and @Dronecatcher , PowerPC Media Center 7.2 now contains a completely up to date media player that runs on all PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above. Performance is really good, AlTiVec optimizations allow great 480p H.264 playback on a Mac mini G4 on Panther and Tiger. I don't think I'll be using any other media player besides FFplay from here on out.

The new preferences system asks you on first launch of PPCMC.app what media player you would like to use for streaming YouTube, Twitch, and playing back videos. It also asks if you'd like videos to start full screen. These preferences will be saved and you won't be asked again, however at any time you can use the 'Edit Preferences' option in the app.

The original thread will still be used for updates and new info on future development, however this release is so massive that it deserves it's own thread.

I'm really curious what resolutions you G5 people can get with this. Twitch streaming and YouTube live streaming is supported at 720p but the Mac mini can't keep up past the rock solid 480p playback.

Full Changes In Version 7.2:
- Updated cURL to latest version, 7.73.0.
- Enabled Zlib in cURL.
- Updated OpenSSL to latest version, 3.0.0 alpha 7.
- Added latest version of FFplay, 4.3.1.
- Updated YouTube-dl to latest version, 2020.09.20.
- New UI and preferences in app.
- Added Panther_SDL2 release 1.
- Rewrote build system, now creates a Tiger and Panther optimized builds.

 

[alex_free]

Of course, google just broke some videos working with YouTube-dl today that worked yesterday. When there is a new YouTube-dl update use the YouTube-dl update option in the app to fix this.

Thanks RIAA

 

[RogerWilco6502]

It was a pleasure helping you test this, hopefully the new update for youtube-dl will come in the near future.

 

[originaldotexe]

now this is epic, i am going to install this right away on my quad g5. B-)

 

[alex_free]

now this is epic, i am going to install this right away on my quad g5. B-)

Can you let me know what kind of performance you can get with that?

 

[wicknix]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but... on my dual 2ghz g5, both 480p and 720p using ffplay have audio/video sync issues on twitch. Like 2-5 seconds delay between audio and video, and the video stutters (just like mplayer does). CPU use is also quite high. 720p uses 83% cpu with ffplay vs 32% using VLC (with no audio/video sync or video stutter issues). I have not tested youtube, just twitch.

Edit: This test was done on Leopard using the Tiger download linked version.
Edit 2: Going from windowed mode to full screen and back to windowed mode results in no window. Its in the dock, but cant be brought back to focus unless you hit "F" to go back to full screen mode.
Edit 3: On my powerbook G4 1.67ghz (also on Leopard), VLC uses 54% cpu at 480p and ffplay uses 73% cpu at 480p.

Cheers

 

[TheShortTimer]

This is great on my eMac 1Ghz but it's effectively unusable on my G3/800 as a media player or for viewing YouTube links. The playback is far too sluggish and slow with files that the computer is more than capable of handling because they play perfectly with mView/mViewX or even VLC. YouTube content either stalls with a single frame or at best musters about 5 frames a second.

On this attempt, PPCMC stalled at the opening frame. The audio was fine throughout though.

PPCMC managed to display a frame from halfway within the clip but nothing else. Again, the audio was faultless.

Here's some grabs of the Terminal windows in case they might help:

 

[alex_free]

This is great on my eMac 1Ghz but it's effectively unusable on my G3/800 as a media player or for viewing YouTube links. The playback is far too sluggish and slow with files that the computer is more than capable of handling because they play perfectly with mView/mViewX or even VLC. YouTube content either stalls with a single frame or at best musters about 5 frames a second.

On this attempt, PPCMC stalled at the opening frame. The audio was fine throughout though.

PPCMC managed to display a frame from halfway within the clip but nothing else. Again, the audio was faultless.

Here's some grabs of the Terminal windows in case they might help:

It’s really too bad G3 performance isn’t great. It seems like G4’s really shine with this, I am surprised to hear about the G5 performance experienced by @wicknix .

There’s always the other external media players supported, but keep in mind the ancient VLC for Panther has terrible codec support compared to FFplay, twitch streaming on Panther essentially requires FFplay.

 

[TheShortTimer]

It’s really too bad G3 performance isn’t great, and after playing with it more some widescreen 480p videos don’t play at full speed on the G4. It seems like G4’s really shine with this, I am surprised to hear about the G5 performance experienced by @wicknix .

With time, surely tweaks and refinements can be made to iron out the problems and improve the performance?

There’s always the other external media players supported, but keep in mind the ancient VLC for Panther has terrible codec support compared to FFplay, twitch streaming on Panther essentially requires FFplay.

I'm running Tiger.

This is what happened when I tried to switch to MPlayer:

VLC:

QuickTime of course is an option but it also struggled. I'll see if RealPlayer SP works.

 

[Dronecatcher]

@alex_free you need to add those parameters to ffplay I mentioned.

On my DLSD, I can slash CPU use from 73% to 41% by adding a few flags:

-loglevel quiet

-skip_frame 8

-skip_loop_filter 48

 

[originaldotexe]

Can you let me know what kind of performance you can get with that?

for starters i've noticed a bug in the script, the variables are defined improperly so if you choose anything other than ffplay (vlc/mplayer) then it just errors out. so i modified the script to set the variables properly and then the vlc check function failed. im not sure why this is, the previous version without ffplay worked great regardless of what i used. obviously i can disable the vlc check function outright since i know that my system has up-to-date vlc but that wouldn't be good for production.

so as i'm writing this i opened it up to test the performance, and youtube-dl is giving me some weird error, something about invalid input data or something like that. i tried to put all of the code in the script back to what it originally was and it's still giving me that error, so i'm not sure. i think maybe youtube has patched youtube-dl after the dmca takedown but i don't know.

but when i tested it yesterday, when youtube-dl was cooperating, it played fine in ffplay. although it's only set up to do 360p or 480p or something like that so i don't really think it's using my g5 quad's full potential at all. i would love to see options for each resolution (360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, etc) on youtube like some of the other streaming things in ppcmc have (twitch etc)

 

[Dronecatcher]

Also, whilst playing ffplay, press w for the 'easteregg'

 

[alex_free]

for starters i've noticed a bug in the script, the variables are defined improperly so if you choose anything other than ffplay (vlc/mplayer) then it just errors out. so i modified the script to set the variables properly and then the vlc check function failed. im not sure why this is, the previous version without ffplay worked great regardless of what i used. obviously i can disable the vlc check function outright since i know that my system has up-to-date vlc but that wouldn't be good for production.

so as i'm writing this i opened it up to test the performance, and youtube-dl is giving me some weird error, something about invalid input data or something like that. i tried to put all of the code in the script back to what it originally was and it's still giving me that error, so i'm not sure. i think maybe youtube has patched youtube-dl after the dmca takedown but i don't know.

but when i tested it yesterday, when youtube-dl was cooperating, it played fine in ffplay. although it's only set up to do 360p or 480p or something like that so i don't really think it's using my g5 quad's full potential at all. i would love to see options for each resolution (360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, etc) on youtube like some of the other streaming things in ppcmc have (twitch etc)

YouTube-dl broke on a lot of videos just yesterday, there’s nothing that can be done until a new update is pushed and with this DMCA stuff it might be a while.

YouTube only offers 360p for standard non live stream videos in a stream-able format.

I’ll push an update fixing those issues, not sure what happened from testing to release.

 

[alex_free]

With time, surely tweaks and refinements can be made to iron out the problems and improve the performance?



I'm running Tiger.

This is what happened when I tried to switch to MPlayer:

VLC:

QuickTime of course is an option but it also struggled. I'll see if RealPlayer SP works.

I’ll fix these ASAP in a quick update soon sorry about the bugs

 

[vddrnnr]

Hi @alex_free,

When using mplayer as the playback option even if you say to not use
fullscreen your script adds -fs to the pref file.
Also I think you can add the following options for mplayer that result in better
performance without loosing much quality

-really-quiet -vo quartz -ao openal -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all

Best regards,
voidRunner

 

[alex_free]

Hi @alex_free,

When using mplayer as the playback option even if you say to not use
fullscreen your script adds -fs to the pref file.
Also I think you can add the following options for mplayer that result in better
performance without loosing much quality

-really-quiet -vo quartz -ao openal -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all

Best regards,
voidRunner

I’ll look into this, also I’ll add the quit arguments to ffplay as well like @Dronecatcher mentioned in 7.2.1.

 

[alex_free]

It was a pleasure helping you test this, hopefully the new update for youtube-dl will come in the near future.

Found a YouTube-dl fork called ‘youtube-dlc’ which is actively maintained and seems to have fixes for the issues the current YouTube-dl has:

Release youtube-dlc 2020.10.26 · blackjack4494/yt-dlc

Changelog: [tiktok] download link + cookie fix #14 @merval @blackjack4494 closes #12 [youtube] updated age gate fix fb2c927 @blackjack4494 closes #13

github.com

I’ll be switching to this unless the original program has some new developments these seems to fix all those errors in the old original YouTube-dl.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Decided to give this a try on my 2006 MBP. I have PPCMC set to use ffplay and answered "Yes" to playing videos at full screen. When I try to play an mp4 file this is what I get in Terminal:

I have tried both the Panther version and the Tiger version and I get the same result. I'm going to try PPCMC 7.2 on my iBook G3 next and report back with the results.

 

[TheShortTimer]

@alex_free Is it possible to create a version for G3 Macs that uses @Dronecatcher's G3 version of mViewX for playback instead? I think that it might be a better choice for these machines due to its extreme framedropping mode. If I had the skills, I'd produce it myself and save you the work.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Decided to give this a try on my 2006 MBP. I have PPCMC set to use ffplay and answered "Yes" to playing videos at full screen. When I try to play an mp4 file this is what I get in Terminal:

View attachment 975825

I have tried both the Panther version and the Tiger version and I get the same result. I'm going to try PPCMC 7.2 on my iBook G3 next and report back with the results.

Tried PPCMC 7.2 on my iBook G3 running Tiger and ffplay works on there.

 

[alex_free]

Decided to give this a try on my 2006 MBP. I have PPCMC set to use ffplay and answered "Yes" to playing videos at full screen. When I try to play an mp4 file this is what I get in Terminal:

View attachment 975825

I have tried both the Panther version and the Tiger version and I get the same result. I'm going to try PPCMC 7.2 on my iBook G3 next and report back with the results.

Thanks for trying this out, I don't have any Intel Macs to test on. I'll mark Intel as unsupported. Strange that Rosetta uses ppc7400 when ppc7450 is an available arch in the FFplay/FFmpeg/FFprobe binaries.

 

[alex_free]

@alex_free Is it possible to create a version for G3 Macs that uses @Dronecatcher's G3 version of mViewX for playback instead? I think that it might be a better choice for these machines due to its extreme framedropping mode. If I had the skills, I'd produce it myself and save you the work.

I think that uses the 2005 Mplayer, which can't be used for streaming. I tried it when initially implementing Mplayer support.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I think that uses the 2005 Mplayer, which can't be used for streaming. I tried it when initially implementing Mplayer support.

Fair enough. As an alternative, could extreme framedropping be included as default for a G3 version? If this is something that can configure myself, please let me know because you have enough on your plate already.

 

[alex_free]

Fair enough. As an alternative, could extreme framedropping be included as default for a G3 version? If this is something that can configure myself, please let me know because you have enough on your plate already.

@Dronecatcher @vddrnnr @originaldotexe

PPCMC 7.2.1 is now available, and it allows you to add your own args to the media player command after setting up your preferences.

I do highly recommend the FFplay args DroneCatcher mentioned for slower machines:
-skip_frame 8 -skip_loop_filter 48

Since they are not necessary on all Macs (This Mac mini can play 480p downloaded YouTube videos without frame drop and with the loop filter at full speed) I don't want them on by default, I think this is a good compromise. The args you add take affect to every relevant option. In the future maybe there will be an option for "better performance" automatically doing this?

Full Changelog:

7.2.1 - 10/29/2020​

Better FFplay performance.

Replaced YouTube-dl 9.20.2020 with YouTube-dlc 10.26.2020. The updater has also been changed to use YouTube-dlc, as YouTube-dl development has stopped since the DMCA.

Rewrote and fixed the preference system. You can now also edit the media player command if you want to expand your initial preferences.

Implemented Dronecatcher on the MacRumor forums suggestion setting the ffplay log level to quiet by default.

 

[TheShortTimer]

@Dronecatcher @vddrnnr @originaldotexe

PPCMC 7.2.1 is now available, and it allows you to add your own args to the media player command after setting up your preferences.

I do highly recommend the FFplay args DroneCatcher mentioned for slower machines:
-skip_frame 8 -skip_loop_filter 48

Since they are not necessary on all Macs (This Mac mini can play 480p downloaded YouTube videos without frame drop and with the loop filter at full speed) I don't want them on by default, I think this is a good compromise. The args you add take affect to every relevant option. In the future maybe there will be an option for "better performance" automatically doing this?

Thanks Alex, you're super efficient with your turnaround on this! ?