720P video lagging, massive framedrops and out of sync

Video recording is seriously compromised for me and any resolution above 640x480. Frame drops, choppy etc.

12.04, AMD64

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

Video recording and video chat both are seriously compromised for me as well with the same symptoms. I'm not using Cheese, however, but see the exact same symptoms in normal webcam usage on Precise Pangolin 12.04, AMD64.

This is a patch for Cheese on Ubuntu 12.04.

This is a patch for gst-plugins-bad0.10 on Ubuntu 12.04.

This issue should be able to be fixed by applying two patches above.
Please help to sponsor or review them, thanks.

Hi fourdollars,

It would be a great help if you created a quantal and precise branch for this, as well as a precise ppa. After that's done, we can get the upload sponsored and move it into -proposed for verification.

Looks like the Cheese part is already in the Quantal package. If you'd like a Precise SRU for this, then please fill out the bug description with the required information from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates and I can sponsor for you.

Thanks!

This bug was fixed in the package gst-plugins-bad0.10 - 0.10.22.3-2ubuntu3

---------------
gst-plugins-bad0.10 (0.10.22.3-2ubuntu3) quantal; urgency=low

  * Add patch cherrypicked from upstream commit 53735eaa to add a "realtime"
    profile to vp8. (LP: #981803)
  * Drop ltmain_as_needed patch and do this through dh-autoreconf.
 -- Iain Lane <email address hidden> Thu, 26 Jul 2012 11:36:49 +0100

Hi Iain,

Thanks for targeting precise and agreeing to sponsor. I've attached two debdiffs against the precise version of the package, and put the sru justification in the bug description. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help move this SRU along. I've also subscribed ubuntu-sru and ubuntu-sponsors

It turned out that shipping a file with that name in gst conflicted with a file in the transmageddon package with the same name. Would naming the preset file something else work?

Also, don't forget to install the new file by adding it to the the debian/…install file (I can't remember the exact package name right now) :-)

Hi Iain & James,

Thanks for your help.
However 'speed=2' doesn't work properly on most low power ATOM processors.
'speed=7' works better, but it is not included in upstream.
Any idea?

Can you file a bug with upstream to ask why they chose '2' instead of '7' and request the change? If there aren't any reasons against then we can have 7 in Ubuntu.

I filed a bug at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680817 .

No need to rename the file; I proposed a transmission SRU in bug #945987 that makes that obsolete. I'm going away tomorrow for the rest of the week but feel free to have someone else upload speed=7 to Quantal and then SRU this all.

Thanks for your persistence.

I've done a little research, and this is more complicated than I thought. First of all, all codecs are supposed to be shipping with their own presets:

> We define 3 quality level profiles, Quality Low,Quality Normal and Quality High. All codecs should define this.

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/PresetDesign

Even so, it looks like transmageddon is the default home for all of these profiles. The PresetDesign page has a few presets that are "canonical" that mirror those in transmageddon That means in order to get the best use of your gstreamer codecs on Ubuntu, you have to install transmageddon, which is counterintuitive and obscure.

Secondly, speed=7 doesn't even look like a valid value

> The "speed" property
>
> "speed" gint : Read / Write
>
> Speed.
>
> Allowed values: [0,2]
>
> Default value: 0

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-bad-plugins/html/gst-plugins-bad-plugins-vp8enc.html#GstVP8Enc--speed

But if you look at the documentation from google, the values allowed for --rt (realtime) are [0-15].

http://www.webmproject.org/tools/encoder-parameters/#2-encode-quality-vs-speed

Based on what fourdollars said, 7 is probably an allowed value, just the gstreamer documentation is wrong.

Thanks for the help Iain, enjoy your time off.

Transmageddon just ships them for its own use. They've acknowledged this in their latest release by moving their presets off to a private directory (the fix I'm trying to SRU to Precise). It's not right for other software to be relying on their settings. gstreamer is the right eventual home for sane defaults to live. So a good outcome of this bug would be us coming up with some sane distribution defaults for the vp8 preset that gstreamer can continue to ship for all software to rely on.

Just realized that in the other bug. I'm going to resubmit the patch for gstreamer with the right .install file.

I've attached a new patch, which has a proper modification to the .install file. Additionally, speed=7 as opposed to the upstream patch where speed=2. Please review.

We're still blocking on bug 945987.

Both uploaded to precise-proposed unapproved. @ubuntu-sru, you probably don't want to release gst to -updates without transmageddon due to the new Conflicts (users will get their transmageddon removed by dpkg if the new one isn't available for them).

Un-subscribing ubuntu-sponsors - please re-subscribe if any further sponsoring is required.

Hello Matthijs, or anyone else affected,

Accepted gst-plugins-bad0.10 into precise-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gst-plugins-bad0.10/0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2.1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please change the bug tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not, change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

Hello Matthijs, or anyone else affected,

Accepted cheese into precise-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cheese/3.4.1-0ubuntu2.1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please change the bug tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not, change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

Much better!

Better but not 100% for me.

This bug was fixed in the package cheese - 3.4.1-0ubuntu2.1

---------------
cheese (3.4.1-0ubuntu2.1) precise-proposed; urgency=low

  * Apply upstream commit e7f9908166b64c6755437b825eb010806c043d21 supplied by
    Shih-Yuan Lee (fourdollars) to use a realtime profile (if available) in
    order to produce smoother videos (LP: #981803)
 -- Iain Lane <email address hidden> Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:47:21 +0100

The verification of this Stable Release Update has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regresssions.

This bug was fixed in the package gst-plugins-bad0.10 - 0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2.1

---------------
gst-plugins-bad0.10 (0.10.22.3-2ubuntu2.1) precise-proposed; urgency=low

  [ James M Leddy ]
  * Add patch cherrypicked from upstream commit 53735eaa to add a "realtime"
    profile to vp8. (LP: #981803)

  [ Iain Lane ]
  * Add Conflicts/Replaces on old versions of transmageddon which shipped a
    file with this name, to ensure that users are upgraded to versions without
    the conflict.
 -- James M Leddy <email address hidden> Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:20:24 +0100

Not sure what to do now, should I open another bug report as this still affects me?

Hi Brendan,

We already have bug385344 for overall bad cheese performance. Please add your comments there. It should be noted that cheese is in the [universe] pocket, and while we're accepting patches and can backport changes from upstream, there isn't any dedicated person working on this at the moment.

This is how I fixed my poor FPS in cheese, on Ubuntu 12.04;

1) sudo apt-get install guvcview;

2) Under image controls look for the drop-down menu item "Exposure, Auto" and select "Manual Mode";

                     "TAB" select the next option!!!

3) You should "TAB" select to the slider bar beneath "Exposure, Auto" labeled "Exposure (Absolute) - use your right arrow key to bump up the selection. Mine was set to "156" so I knocked it up to "157" then down to "155", and back again to "156". Now my exposure it fine, and I get a solid 30fps at 1280x720.

I'm not sure how or why this works, but it seems the exposure it set way too high or something.

Anyway, just quit out of guvcview and launch cheese. Everything should be working now. Or at least it did for me.