[MPlayer-users] Re: [expert] NVidia will be bannished

[daniel carter]

Nick Kurshev wrote:

>>nvidia has an entire TEAM of people
>>working on their driver, and they've got a lot more in the way of
>>resources than we do. 
>>
>Yes! Since TEAM has docs. But how many they worry about Linux users?
>
They worry allot in my experience.  I posted my troubles about using 
mplayer with xinerama on a TWinView GeForce card to the xfree86 mailing 
list.  I suggested one possible feature addition to the driver to avoid 
the need for xinerama and asked for more info about how an application 
should interact with xinerama.

I had two prompt replies from different members of the nvidia driver 
development team.
One guy thanked me for my post because that feature was on his todo list 
and it helps them prioritise when they hear about how their chips are 
being used.
The other guy explained to me how xinerama works in conjunction with 
TwinView, and answered i couple of questions i had when i was writing 
the patch to fix/enhance mplayers xinerama support.

>This subj has one goal is to tell to everyone
>that NVidia is not good solution for opensource systems (due unstability,
>proprietarity of its software and many other negative factors).
>
It's 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.
I've had pleanty of X11 crashes using opensource drivers.  With the 
opensource drivers for i815 on my machine at work it crashes if i stay 
in a text console for more than 30 seconds.
The binary drivers for my nvidia card are the most stable X11 driver 
i've ever used.  Way more stable than the opensource drivers for my 
previous S3 card.

But i have no doubt that many people experience the complete opposite to 
me, running on buggy AMD Irongate AGP chipsets i hear about lots of 
crashes with NVIDIA.  Maybe my i815 grahpics chip just doesn't like the 
i815 motherboard chipset :p

>