Serious video performance regression in cheese (2.28.1->2.30.1)

I just downloaded and compiled 2.28.1 on Maverick and had the same poor performance that I get with 2.30.1, and I suspect the same will hold true for Lucid. This seems to indicate a regression in one of the packages cheese depends on.

Robbie, we discussed this on a call with Dell this morning, and they commented that this really needs to be tested on a low-horsepower machine like a Dell Mini in order to see the difference between 2.28 and 2.30. Testing to date has been on 10.04 only.

Tony, sure...I believe them. I was simply saying the performance sucks for me on 2.28 and 2.30...on a Thinkpad X301! So I can only imagine how much worse it is on a low horsepower machine. I wonder if this has anything to do with writing to an ext4 filesystem, as it only occurs when you start recording. It's either the filesystem, or how cheese is using v4l2.

Robert, could you try to figure what the issue is there?

Confirming the issue on my Dell mini.

Cheese is running a pipeline very similar to:
$ gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! theoraenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=test.ogg

Running this on my Dell mini and Studio laptop show very unreliable video being recorded.

It appears is the v4l component and/or the interaction with theoraenc that is the problem as a test signal encodes reliably:
$ gst-launch-0.10 videotestsrc ! theoraenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=test.ogg

Reassigning to gstreamer, we don't have anybody knowing gstreamer well in the team but upstream might have an idea on the issue

slomo (debian maintainer) said on it that it might be fixed with latest good release, "v4l2src had a bug since many release, that made it prefer color format conversion over the native format of the camera"

the new gstreamer has been uploaded to maverick, I can test the difference though since cheese has stopped detecting my webcam some days ago in maverick for some reason, could somebody try with the update?

just updated and no change in behavior seen with cheese...still poor video recording.

ftr, this was tested on a Thinkpad X301 with built-in webcam.

Fedora bugs with the same problems (no solutions in comments):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=572671
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=572169
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=572166
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=507450

Last night we confirmed this issue and a Dell mini 10v running Lucid as well as on Maverick. An update to cheese yesterday seems to have ameliorated the issue on my Maverick Desktop though.

The update shows the following results on my Dell mini:

At resolution 160x120:
- Pause of about 4s where no video is displayed
- Between 4-7s erratic frame rate
- 7s+ reliable video

At 1280x1024
- Occasionally frame shown (>15s per frame)

It seems an improvement on the 14s delay previously seen. Note that in both cases <100% of CPU is being used.

As a comparison I switched out the vorbis/theora codec and replaced it MP3/MPEG - the performance was even worse.

Taking out the videorate and videoscale components both of which should not be doing anything I don't think (i.e. the rate and resolution from the camera is fine) makes the video work faster. These elements have not changed from cheese 2.28.1 indicating a possible GStreamer problem. Removing these elements may not work on differing hardware?

I don't see this getting fixed for Maverick, though it is a very unfortunate situation. For natty, we may need to change the system to first capture video without any encoding, and then encode it after the fact (rather than do it on the fly as cheese tries to now).

My cheese is buggy as well im on an acer 8930g no sound and rubbish video quality very slow .I uninstalled it.

Same issue on a Thinkpad T60.

I have some patch for cheese on natty.
https://launchpad.net/~fourdollars/+archive/cheese
https://code.launchpad.net/~fourdollars/cheese/bug-610600

To lower video frame rate can get acceptable result.

<cmd>
gst-launch \
    autoaudiosrc ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=webcam.ogv \
    v4l2src ! 'video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480,framerate=5/1' ! tee name=webcam \
    webcam. ! queue ! timeoverlay ! xvimagesink \
    webcam. ! queue ! videorate ! theoraenc ! mux.
</cmd>

Test on Asus EeePC 1011PX.

Test on Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3.

<cmd>
gst-launch \
                        autoaudiosrc ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=webcam.ogv \
                        v4l2src ! videorate ! timeoverlay ! 'video/x-raw-yuv,width=320,height=240,framerate=15/1' ! tee name=webcam \
                        webcam. ! queue ! xvimagesink \
                        webcam. ! queue ! theoraenc ! mux.

</cmd>

<cmd>
gst-launch \
                        autoaudiosrc ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=webcam.ogv \
                        v4l2src ! videorate ! timeoverlay ! 'video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480,framerate=5/1' ! tee name=webcam \
                        webcam. ! queue ! xvimagesink \
                        webcam. ! queue ! theoraenc ! mux.
</cmd>

Comment #22 can also get acceptable result.
If I can integrate Comment #20 and Comment #22, it should fix cheese performance issue on Atom CPUs.

Although reducing video frame rate can get acceptable result on Atom CPUs, it also affects the quality of video recording on other CPUs that they can get better quality originally.

Comment #22 can also get acceptable result on Asus EeePC 1011PX.

http://paste.ubuntu.com/688909/ check_atom_cpu() can be used to check Intel ATOM CPU.

bzr commit -m "Checking Intel ATOM CPU to determine video frame rate. (LP: #610600)" --fixes lp:610600 # Committed revision 61.
bzr push lp:~fourdollars/cheese/bug-610600/ # Pushed up to revision 61.
dput ppa:fourdollars/cheese cheese_2.32.0-0ubuntu2.1~natty3_source.changes

This seems to be fixed in oneiric. I get an aceptable performance now.

Thanks for reporting back. Closing.

I can *not* confirm that his is fixed. I still have very poor video performance when recording from my webcam with Oneiric on an HP 625. The symptoms are the same as in the original description. First, a freeze of some seconds, and the recorded video is unusable.

OK, reopening.

Setting to "won't fix" because I don't think anyone is going to be backporting such changes.

I've confirmed that this is still an issue in Precise.

What happens is that cheese starts recording. Everything is good for about 5 seconds. Then an icon appears under the main webcam viewing thing and (I assume) cheese starts transcoding/flushing to disk. At this point everything gets really choppy, both in the eventual recording, and in the display.