[MPlayer-users] How to most efficiently play back DVDs...

[Brent Roman]

OK.  I've gotten the message that many folks don't hold
any great love for nVidia.  I just bought my TNT2 because
it seems like a really good deal about 1 yr ago.
(Fry's for $79 :-)

How can I get the best DVD playback performance with
it under mplayer?

Right now, I'm dropping about 5% of frames when I
play through the vesa driver.  I was hopping the the
new vidix subdriver would get me that last 5%, but
it dosn't look like my card is supported or will be
anytime soon.  The performance under X-windows with
the xv or gl2 drivers is worse.   (xv driver is
the faster of the two).

By the way, my system is a 500Mhz K6-2 w/384MB DRAM.
I'm using an SBLive! board with OSS drivers.

I've read that others can playback DVD's with this
setup and the Matrox video boards.  Why is this?
Do the Matrox boards do the colorspace conversions 
and scaling in hardware?  Do they accellerate the
MP2 decode in hardware?  In short, in mplayer, what do 
they accellerate that the nVidia boards to not?

I completely understand the frustration
of dealing with closed-source in a otherwise open-source
environment like linux.  I also understand why nVidia
can't opensource their code due to fears of lawsuits.  

Have they released register-level programming docs for
their chips?  This shouldn't be encumbered by patents,
as it should be all their own IP. (I think?)

Finally, if I were to purchase a new video board,
which ones are best supported by mplayer right now?

-- 
 Brent Roman                                   MBARI
 Software Engineer               Tel: (831) 775-1808
 7700 Sandholdt Road,         Moss Landing, CA 95039
 mailto:brent at mbari.org  http://www.mbari.org/~brent