Info-beamer pi H265 multiple video instances

We were really happy to see the standalon h265 version and already tested it, to full success :slight_smile:

One question: there is now a limitation that there is only one decoder slot, so it’s not possible to preload the next video. Do you plan to add more slots or we need to work around this?

Thank you

I’ve moved this into its own topic, as I feel it deserves one :slight_smile:

Correct. Right now, only a single instance of the decoder is possible. This is due to corruption that occurs if multiple decoder instances run at the same time. It’s still unclear to me why that happens. See also this Pi forum thread. Hopefully this will improve in the future, but I cannot make any promises at the moment.

Also multiple decoders use a lot of memory. For a 4K video, one will easily consume 64MB + 8*16MB or so. This adds up quite fast.

Thank you. I hope they add more slots to the decoder soon…

To be fair, this is more of an info-beamer issue. The hardware decoder should in theory be able to do this, but for some reason it doesn’t work yet and I don’t have the in-depth knowledge of that piece of hardware to say what the exact reason is. There is now an official patch to FFmpeg on Raspbian, but info-beamer cannot use that one at the moment as its API is incompatible.

At some point info-beamer will be ported over and it might be fixed by that, but I don’t see this as a high priority task at the moment as multiple HEVC videos is a bad idea anyway as you’re very likely to get lost video signals due to too much load on the Pis video scaler generating the HDMI output. We’ll see.

I actually don’t need multiple 4K videos playing…but i need to load a second file for seamless playback switching. Is there a workaround for that maybe?
Thank.

Not at the moment. Seamless playback requires a second instance of the decoder: It must already start decoding the next video while the current one is ending. That way it can immediately take over once it’s finished. Right now having two instances of the decoder produces corrupt output can might even crash the firmware. There is no workaround for that at the moment.