[MPlayer-dev-eng] Import of VIDIX drivers

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 01:29:37PM +0400, Nick Kurshev wrote:
> Hello, Arpi!
> 
> Why you don't import fixed vidix drivers?
> Do you have planes to remove this technology from mplayer?
> I ask it because I have planes to implement bus mastering
> as next step of decoding speedup (after finding or implementing
> some dha_helper for linux ;) but this feature is useless
> in single-thread decoding since speed of dma transfer ~= speed
> of CPU transfer and only possitive effect from this technology
> can be reached with using decoding ahead in thread-based version.
> Probably it would be possible to apply some tricks for single-thread
> decoding too but i don't exanime this question due motivation reasons.

Why does mplayer need to wait for the bus mastered DMA transfer to
finish before it can continue running? This seems rather silly. Just
send the commands and use the other two buffers (assuming triple
buffering) until the vidix driver reports completion (check at each
frame, should take well under a frame or you're in trouble). I don't
see how threads are beneficial to this.

Rich