[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] vo_vesa fixes for some cards

[The Wanderer]

D Richard Felker III wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 02:37:16AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> D Richard Felker III wrote:

>>> anything with acceleration would be a lot faster. why can't they
>>> use vidix?
>> 
>> I don't know why not for certain (although I'm not certain they
>> have what could properly be called "acceleration" available), but
>> I've never really had VIDIX working either, at least not when not
>> root (and I'm not sure about then, either). I did get it going
>> once, for about the space of one video, with dhahelper - but that
>> stopped working almost immediately, and only worked in the first
>> place after I got Sascha to add detection support for my graphics
>> card.
> 
> use svgalib_helper instead. it works perfectly.

I think I've heard that mentioned, but I don't know where to find it.
(Admittedly I also haven't yet Googled - I'd do that before posting, but
I'm in a hurry to get to my food before it gets cold.)

>> Not to mention that in my admittedly limited experience (mostly
>> from fiddling around back when I had a much, much slower machine),
>> VESA is perhaps the fastest video-out method, with the primary but
>> large
> 
> no. anything that uses rgb colorspace is VERY slow. that includes
> vesa. even something slow like xv will be faster than vesa... the
> only slower vo is x11.

...which was my only real other option back then, since I think I had
some problems with xv (I don't remember what) and I had no 3D
acceleration and so couldn't use gl - and there must have been *some*
problem with sdl, but I don't remember what other than its being too
slow when doing fullscreen. (VESA had the other disadvantage of using
what looked like reverse video in RM files... which is why I was so glad
to finally get better hardware.)

>> disadvantage being that it can only be used from the console (as a
>> side effect of which the console messages which get printed are
>> never visible). With anything else, I couldn't reliably get
>> full-speed playback in (or IIRC in some cases out of) fullscreen,
>> even of a fairly simple 320x240 file; with -vo vesa, some
>> considerably more taxing things played just fine.
> 
> you must be doing something stupid like trying to scale the video to
> fullscreen. a 320x240 movie will play just fine even on a low-end
> pentium.

Nope, simple 'mplayer -fs filename.avi'. The system in question was a
475MHz AMD K* (I don't remember the specifics), with IIRC 192MB of RAM -
not spectacular (except in that I've never even heard of another machine
with such a strange processor speed number), but should certainly have
been enough for the purpose.

I don't have the system anymore (long since disassembled and split up
among other people - including I think at least one of the two I
mentioned), so I can't give too much more information than that. I'm
willing to take your word on the performance differences in principle,
however, which means the experience in my case was rather odd...

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.