Any way to display fullscreen video with subtitles on 1080p/720p display?

[mduchalski]

Hello,

 

I'm a new user of Orange Pi One - it just arrived yesterday. I installed Armbian and hoped to try out some H264 video. It appeared just fine on the first time - but I noticed lack of any OSD/subtitles. I tried to use different player (VLC), played with different video outputs. 'X11' worked well on both VLC and mpv... until I tried fullscreen.

 

After long time spent researching the topic I found out that Armbian is using libvdpau-surni whitch is a community driver reversed-engeineered from Allwinner's commertial one, apparently avalibale for Android. I also read that its output will alvays overlap any other elements of the screen including subtitles, menus etc.. Then I tried two different approaches:

(1) To change screen resolution using h3disp to 720p/576p and decode using software (after all - we have 4 cores there) - this failed because Orange Pi cannot scale proparly using any setting on my TV on any resolution other than 1080p.

(2) To enable OSD some other way - now, there are a few solutions online - surni's FAQ mentions method that doesn't work on H3 (I tried, it does not), some people also talk about forcing rgba mkv OSD rendering - neither of that worked for me.

 

There lies my question - is there any way to overcome this issue? Force proper scaling or enable OSD some other way I missed? Thank in advance for your answers.

 

-Mateusz

[jsa]

Hello,

 

I'm a new user of Orange Pi One - it just arrived yesterday. I installed Armbian and hoped to try out some H264 video. It appeared just fine on the first time - but I noticed lack of any OSD/subtitles. I tried to use different player (VLC), played with different video outputs. 'X11' worked well on both VLC and mpv... until I tried fullscreen.

 

...

 

There lies my question - is there any way to overcome this issue? Force proper scaling or enable OSD some other way I missed? Thank in advance for your answers.

 

To enable subtitles, and any other form of on-screen display, you need to set the environment variable VDPAU_OSD=1. To make it permanent add the line 'VDPAU_OSD=1' to /etc/environment or .bashrc.

 

You need to be running Armbian 5.20. See also http://docs.armbian.com/Release_Changelog/, search for VDPAU_OSD.

 

This works really well for me, except that mpv begins to stutter when the Opi1 heats up. Haven't found a solution for that yet, other than exiting (shift-Q) and restarting mpv.