video setup?

[babag]

i'm running reaper on kubuntu/kxstudio and have vlc 3.0.4 installed as a system video player. when i put a video file (tried a dv file as well as mp4/h264) onto a track i see the first frame in the video window but the video is not playing. the audio is fine. reaper is installed in /opt/REAPER. have i got something wrong? do i need to put something in the /opt/REAPER folder?

(fwiw, i'd be happy to use ffmpeg too. instructions for linux?)

thanks,
babag

[JamesPeters]

I didn't have VLC available as a decoder until recently either (my VLC version is now 3.0.7, after a recent update from the package manager). VLC became available to me in Reaper for Linux after that.

I used FFMPEG in the meantime, and sometimes it's still better to use depending on the specific video file. Reaper seems to detect the FFMPEG on my system and use it without any problems. I think either it was already in the particular distro that I use, or I ran the "MX codecs installer" after I installed the OS (I don't remember).

I'll be switching to Mint in the next couple days so I'll let you know how that goes, if anything is different.

[Glennbo]

Originally Posted by JamesPeters

I'll be switching to Mint in the next couple days so I'll let you know how that goes, if anything is different.

Are you doing this just for a test or has MX done something to make you want to switch?

[JamesPeters]

There are a couple things with MX that irritate me.

One is the "force full composition pipeline" (for nvidia drivers) issue I'm having. If I write the data to xorg.conf, when I reboot I get just the background image for the desktop and although that's all I see; I could run things, but I could not see them. I figured that out when my mouse cursor turned into the text cursor and I was able to type commands to reboot or logout, even though I couldn't see the text; I used the opportunity to "manually" revert the xorg.conf file in terminal to fix the problem. I had to make the "force full composition pipeline" command part of my startup group instead for some reason. This problem has existed for a couple versions of MX Linux (and my system) no matter what kernel version I chose, or whether I used sysvinit or systemd.

The second thing: because of an update from yesterday (an update that happened several days after I updated to the latest kernel), now when I boot I get a black screen with blinking underscore (and I can't do anything other than reboot with alt+ctrl+del). I'm able to boot using an older kernel which still exists on the system (that's what I'm using now) so I'm ok. But something got screwed up. It may have something to do with the fact I had to choose the latest kernel (which is being used in 18.3) in the package manager otherwise it wouldn't update itself; this is a problem pointed out on the MX forum, including that solution to updating the kernel.

So maybe the "rolling" nature of the MX distro is a bit messed up. I decided that if I'm going to reinstall Linux to get it fixed, at this point I'd rather try a more mainstream distro. If Mint works as well, I have no problem using it. I don't want to stick to the more "bleeding edge" side of things. Besides with my new Ryzen 7 coming, I won't have to be as concerned about keeping the kernel updated due to speculative execution exploits. More people I know are using Mint anyway, so it might be nice to be able to explain things to them from that particular perspective when they have issues (if I'm running the same distro, it's easier to walk someone through a fix).

I'm also not allergic to systemd for some unexplainable reason, like some people. Man, Linux nerds can be annoying. I can't find a significant reason for people hating on it, other than their personal feelings for the main author (and the fact it's a bit more complicated to mess with the kernel if they want, which I don't care about).

One more thing: GCC is 7.3.0 in the latest Mint (not LMDE). The latest Reapack doesn't work with the older GCC. It'd be nice to get the latest version of Reapack. I'm not going to start messing with dependencies to get a more current version of GCC working in MX.

[Glennbo]

Cool. I will be watching to see how your journey goes.

Oh, one thing with that pipeline command. There are two variations of it, which may or may not have anything to do with what you are seeing, but I remember when I was getting it set on my system that one version did nothing and the other fixed the screen tearing problem. May make no difference but if you can still edit xorg.conf you might try flipping from one to the other.

The difference being the addition of "Full" in the second variation.

ForceCompositionPipeline vs ForceFullCompositionPipeline


I've been wanting to experiment with other versions of Linux and maybe setup a REAPER only drive. I think to do multiple installs of Linux though that I will likely buy a four bay IcyDock to put in the front of my machine so I could eject all the drives I use currently and pop in a fresh SSD that is all by itself, where nothing weird or unexpected will happen on other drives.

One of these ICY DOCK 4x2.5 SSD units is what I'm thinking.

[JamesPeters]

I tried both aspects ("full" composition pipeline or otherwise) and had the same issue. Anyway if I don't do "full" it would leave screen tear in some apps so I'd have to change it at some point. It's a shame that there's no AMD fanless GPU (especially at a low price) that's quite as good as the 1030 (DDR4) that I have. I hate noise from GPU fans and I don't need much for GPU, but I want some decent GPU (for SuperTuxKart for instance). Anyway a friend is running Mint and he had no problems with writing that change to his xorg.conf, so we'll see how it goes for me on Mint.

I suspect I'll get similar performance for Reaper using Mint as I am using MX. I didn't have to do anything special other than install qjackctl (which did the RT group for me).

And if it sucks for some reason, it's easy to go back again. Either way I think I need to do a clean install of an OS.

[babag]

just posted in bug reports about this. found similar behavior in w10. when trying older versions of reaper, though, found that somewhere between reaper 5.01 and 5.12 this problem started.

thanks,
babag

[JamesPeters]

Check your private messages.

[babag]

thanks, james. before i go and bug you with files, i may be on to something regarding this. i think it has to do with permission, groups, etc. someone, maybe you, mentioned this before but it looks to be the cause. i just set up the latest build and it's running fine so far. all the video is playing properly. details to follow.

thanks for your interest and offers. hopefully this solves things and i can move on. if this does seem to solve my issues, i'll start a new thread. i set up a lot of things to test this and will want to clean up now. not sure the proper way to do that linux-wise.

thanks again,
babag
(btw, the amps look awesome!)

[babag]

it had to be too good to be true. didn't survive a reboot. now same behavior as before with an added bit of detail. this time around i've been able to get dv/avi files to play. the way that seems to work is that, if i play one in the media explorer first and it successfully plays there, then it successfully plays in the timeline as well. not so with the mjpg or prores files. they don't play at all. audio does play but not video.

more info:

i installed the latest 5.979+dev625. i took things incrementally. started by just extracting the tar to my downloads folder. ran reaper right after extracting and imported the various video files. each played fine.

then i did things like adding sws, importing configs from past version, copying reaper folder to ~/opt. each time i did one of these things i ran reaper through a test import of all of the video files. each time they all played fine. started to look like problem solved. then i rebooted and the problem returned as described at the start of this post.

[babag]

just posted a possible solution in the bug reports forum:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=222434

bottom line is there seem to be no problems with video if i save, close reaper, reopen reaper after adding a video file. seems very clunky but i tested 17 different video file formats and they all worked with a save, close, reopen procedure. none worked unless i did that.

thanks,
babag