[Spice-devel] Stuttering video playback on LAN

Sun May 17 14:08:31 UTC 2020

On 5/16/20 7:07 PM, Felix Leimbach wrote:
> Hi Ferdiano
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I experience stuttering video playback in remote-viewer despite connecting
>>> via GBit/s LAN, using fast hardware and the QXL driver.
>>> Up until a video size of roughly 800x600 the playback is smooth. But on
>>> anything bigger, like my native resolution of 2540x1440, video playback is
>>> stuttering annoyingly.
>>> After lots of unsuccessful tinkering with spice parameters and qxl parameters
>>> I'm asking you guys for help.
>>>
>>> Client:
>>> Windows 10 1909
>>> Remote Viewer 8.0-256
>>> Quadcore i7-7820HQ 2.9GHz
>>> 16GB DDR4 RAM
>>>
>>> Host of the VM:
>>> Gentoo Linux
>>> Kernel 4.14.172
>>> Qemu 4.2.0
> 
> I've updated to newer versions in the meantime, but no noticeable changes.
> 
> Qemu 5.0.0
> Host kernel 5.4.39
> Remote Viewer 9.0-256 (x64) on the Windows 10 Client
> 
>>> Quadcore i7-7700K 4.2GHz
>>> 64GB DDR4 RAM
>>> Server is headless, has no dedicated graphics card, only the Intel HD 630
>>> from the CPU
>>>
>>> Guest VM:
>>> Debian Bullseye
>>> I don't think it's guest related, because the same problem happens with a
>>> Windows 10 Guest with latest QXL drivers and spice-tools installed.
>>>
>>> Network performance client<=>host:
>>> Ping 0.2ms
>>> Throughput benchmarked at 960MBit/s
>>>

<snipped>

> I noticed very high CPU usage in the guest during playback, because chrome, vlc, mpv used software h264 decoding.
> I fixed this by passing a virtualized instance of the hosts Intel GPU to the guest via GVT-g.
> 
> These are the qemu parameters I use for GVT-g:
> -spice port=5906,addr=10.42.2.250,password=changed
> -vga virtio
> -display egl-headless,rendernode=/dev/dri/card0
> -device vfio-pci,sysfsdev=/sys/bus/mdev/devices/f14c80d5-9ade-4802-9509-1d877d32d159,display=on,ramfb=on,driver=vfio-pci-nohotplug

Perhaps here it would help to set streaming-video=all -spice option.

> 
> Unfortunately video playback is still not smoother. In fact it is about the same smoothness but new visual artefacts in the video make it worse. I think this is due to egl-headless.
> For testing/comparison I installed a Windows 10 guest with the same GVT-g GPU and used RDP with h264 activated. Playback was much better and used only about 120MBit/s.
> 
> Next I tried using the spice-streaming-agent in the guest to send a h264 encoded picture via spice.
> However, the windows build of remote-viewer doesn't seem to support this. The new spice display is created and I see the mouse cursor in it but no picture (just black).

You may be the first to test spice-streaming-agent + windows client.

I think there is some work to be done in the windows client to make
it handle better streams from spice-streaming-agent

Also there is some work to be done to enable spice-streaming-agent
on windows guests.

> Log from the guest:
> felix at idefix:~$ ./spice-streaming-agent -d
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: GOT START_STOP message -- request to START streaming
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: streaming starts now
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: Got device info of 1 devices from the plugin
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]:    stream id 0: device address: pci/0000/06.0, device display id: 2
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: got a frame -- size is 321265 (26 ms) (1589641660285 ms from last frame)(1589641660258136 us)
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: wXh 1920X1200  codec=1

Note that it's not H264, but MJPEG (codec=1)

Uri

> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: got a frame -- size is 335175 (87 ms) (87 ms from last frame)(189 us)
> spice-streaming-agent[2465]: got a frame -- size is 341098 (133 ms) (133 ms from last frame)(66 us)
> 
> Log from remote-viewer.exe on client (Windows):
> remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-WARNING **: 16:36:47.347: notify the server that stream 48 does not exist
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 16:36:47.348: display_handle_stream_clip: assertion 'st != NULL' failed
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-WARNING **: 16:36:47.356: notify the server that stream 41 does not exist
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 16:36:47.357: display_handle_stream_clip: assertion 'st != NULL' failed
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-WARNING **: 16:36:47.363: notify the server that stream 33 does not exist
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 16:36:47.364: display_handle_stream_clip: assertion 'st != NULL' failed
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-WARNING **: 16:36:47.366: notify the server that stream 34 does not exist
> (remote-viewer.exe:1436): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 16:36:47.367: display_handle_stream_clip: assertion 'st != NULL
> 
> If I use remote viewer from a linux client then it does indeed work! Playback is nearly smooth, about the same as with RDP and h264!
> So I guess it's a bug in the windows remote-viewer. Seems like it doesn't have gstreamer support, so I'll open a bug report.
> 
> Any other ideas what I can try to get good reasonable video playback with good office-work performance?
> 
> On a side note: Audio via spice isn't working. I hear a few strange noises and then only silence. So I use pulseaudio transmitting the sound to the client independent of spice.
> 
>>> -spice
>>> streaming-video=off,image-compression=off,jpeg-wan-compression=never,zlib-glz-wan-compression=never,playback-compression=off
>>>
>>> Guest kernel:
>>> Linux guest 5.4.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.4.19-1 (2020-02-13) x86_64
>>> GNU/Linux
>>> guest kernel: qxl 0000:00:03.0: remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers: bar 0:
>>> 0xe8000000 -> 0xefffffff
>>> guest kernel: qxl 0000:00:03.0: remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers: bar 1:
>>> 0xf0000000 -> 0xf7ffffff
>>> guest kernel: qxl 0000:00:03.0: remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers: bar 2:
>>> 0xf8054000 -> 0xf8055fff
>>> guest kernel: qxl 0000:00:03.0: remove_conflicting_pci_framebuffers: bar 4:
>>> 0xd0000000 -> 0xdfffffff
>>> guest kernel: qxl 0000:00:03.0: vgaarb: deactivate vga console
>>> guest kernel: [drm] Device Version 0.0
>>> guest kernel: [drm] Compression level 0 log level 0
>>> guest kernel: [drm] 24574 io pages at offset 0x2000000
>>> guest kernel: [drm] 33554432 byte draw area at offset 0x0
>>> guest kernel: [drm] RAM header offset: 0x7ffe000
>>> guest kernel: [drm] qxl: 32M of VRAM memory size
>>> guest kernel: [drm] qxl: 127M of IO pages memory ready (VRAM domain)
>>> guest kernel: [drm] qxl: 256M of Surface memory size
>>> guest kernel: [drm] slot 0 (main): base 0xe8000000, size 0x07ffe000,
>>> gpu_offset 0x20000000000
>>> guest kernel: [drm] slot 1 (surfaces): base 0xd0000000, size 0x10000000,
>>> gpu_offset 0x30000000000
>>> guest kernel: [drm] Initialized qxl 0.1.0 20120117 for 0000:00:03.0 on minor
>>> 0
>>> guest kernel: fbcon: qxldrmfb (fb0) is primary device
>>> guest kernel: qxl 0000:00:03.0: fb0: qxldrmfb frame buffer device
>>>
>>> Guest X-Org:
>>> X.Org X Server 1.20.8
>>> [   205.516] (II) LoadModule: "qxl"
>>> [   205.516] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/qxl_drv.so
>>> [   205.518] (II) Module qxl: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
>>> [   205.520] (II) qxl: Driver for QXL virtual graphics: QXL 1
>>> [   205.525] (II) qxl(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen
>>> section
>>> [   205.525] (==) qxl(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
>>> [   205.525] (==) qxl(0): RGB weight 888
>>> [   205.525] (==) qxl(0): Default visual is TrueColor
>>> [   205.525] (==) qxl(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
>>> [   205.525] (II) qxl(0): Deferred Frames: Disabled
>>> [   205.525] (II) qxl(0): Offscreen Surfaces: Enabled
>>> [   205.525] (II) qxl(0): Image Cache: Enabled
>>> [   205.525] (II) qxl(0): Fallback Cache: Enabled
>>> [   205.525] (==) qxl(0): DPI set to (96, 96)
>>> # glxgears
>>> 9709 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1941.675 FPS
>>> 11719 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2343.780 FPS
>>>
>>> Remote-Viewer console output on Windows client:
>>> "C:\Program Files\VirtViewer v8.0-256\bin\remote-viewer.exe"
>>> --hotkeys=toggle-fullscreen=shift+f11 spice://10.42.2.250:5906
>>> (remote-viewer.exe:16324): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 08:00:32.467:
>>> _usbdk_hider_update: assertion 'priv->usbdk_api != NULL' failed
>>> (remote-viewer.exe:16324): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 08:00:32.526: file
>>> ../../src/usb-device-manager.c: line 1815 (probe_isochronous_endpoint):
>>> should not be reached
>>> (remote-viewer.exe:16324): Gtk-WARNING **: 08:00:32.950: Theme directory
>>> 256x256 at 2/animations of theme hicolor has no size field
>>> (remote-viewer.exe:16324): Spice-WARNING **: 08:00:50.804:
>>> ../../src/channel-display-gst.c:715:gstvideo_has_codec: No video decoders
>>> from GStreamer were found
>>> (remote-viewer.exe:16324): GSpice-CRITICAL **: 08:00:50.912:
>>> _usbdk_hider_update: assertion 'priv->usbdk_api != NULL' failed
>>> (remote-viewer.exe:16324): GSpice-WARNING **: 08:00:50.919: Warning no
>>> automount-inhibiting implementation available
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Felix
> 
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