Totem uses dramatically higher CPU than any other video player

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Confirmed the problem is the gstreamer-clutter plugin (which only totem seems to use by default). You can see the same problem here:

High CPU:
gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=bbb_sunflower_1080p_60fps_normal.mp4 ! qtdemux ! vaapidecodebin ! clutterautovideosink

Low CPU:
gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=bbb_sunflower_1080p_60fps_normal.mp4 ! qtdemux ! vaapidecodebin ! glimagesink

Actually about 25-30% of the problem is still totem-specific. The rest is common to other users of clutterautovideosink like:
  gst-play-1.0 --videosink=clutterautovideosink ...

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This bug was fixed in the package totem - 3.25.90.1-0ubuntu2

---------------
totem (3.25.90.1-0ubuntu2) artful; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/fix-bvw_update_tags-performance.patch:
    - bacon-video-widget.c: Reduce CPU usage and visible stuttering
      (LP: #1698282 and LP: #1698270).

 -- Daniel van Vugt <email address hidden> Mon, 21 Aug 2017 16:10:19 +0800

Does the fix apply in Xenial?

Debug log requested by upstream: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=786561

Upstream bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=786561 was initially, and still is, for totem too. The main totem patch is there.

Another prototype fix done, this one more likely to be accepted upstream:
https://git.launchpad.net/~vanvugt/ubuntu/+source/clutter-gtk/commit/?id=eef8eb07e2516d08a984f8128a308943de0d0902

but not until I figure out the smoothness issue separately (visible in gnome-maps panning at least).

Work in progress still... https://git.launchpad.net/~vanvugt/ubuntu/+source/clutter-gtk?h=fix-1698282

Debdiff for artful to fix the majority of the problem.

I've uploaded the clutter-gtk fix to Debian and to Ubuntu's queue. I'm unsubscribing ubuntu-sponsors. Feel free to re-subscribe if you have something else that needs sponsoring.

This bug was fixed in the package clutter-gtk - 1.8.4-2

---------------
clutter-gtk (1.8.4-2) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Daniel van Vugt ]
  * Fix high CPU usage (particularly in Wayland sessions) when clutter redraws.
    Hardware redraws of the clutter stage were unexpectedly triggering software
    redraws of the backing window and its decorations. On _every_ frame.
    This halves the CPU usage of totem and gnome-maps. (LP: #1698282)

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Mon, 09 Oct 2017 21:50:47 -0400

This gstreamer fix is also in Ubuntu, and is the intended replacement for my totem patch (no longer required):

commit 39e21bb6dd79e467ff747ab93b19078f03d03646
Author: Tim-Philipp Müller <email address hidden>
Date: Thu Aug 24 16:00:42 2017 +0100

    baseparse: fix taglist update spam

It appears we've reached a milestone today: totem's CPU usage is no longer significantly higher than gst-play-1.0 --videosink=clutterautovideosink (or glimagesink)

If you compare it to mpv though, totem is 2-3 times heavier still. However profiling totem and gst-play-1.0 today seems to suggest that is due to:
  (a) Lack of DMA-buf support in clutter-gst (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759209)
  (b) General complexity of GStreamer

I think the remaining piece here is to get (a) fixed. However before that will ever work for us, apparently gstreamer-vaapi needs additional fixing so that it does not conflict with the patch we're using for Ubuntu right now: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=784369#c12

It sounds like this remaining piece (a) is in progress with upstream. And (b) doesn't look as significant or like a realistically solvable problem any time soon. So I think I'm done here, unless I can help upstream with (a)...

Upstream bug (possibly related) attached:
https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/issues/379

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.