[MPlayer-users] DVD conclusion

[Brian]

Hi

>> no, his time
>> i know that cpu, at least the 200mhz variant, it runs at the speed of my
>> oldy 486dx33, has mmx, but no tsc and some other basic feature of p1 cpus
>> in short: it's a shit, like arm and other embedded things.
>> it's not designed for software decoding, just to control stuff like hw
>> decoders, web browsers etc in a settopbox

not quite, 800Mhz eden performance is around 550Mhz celeron, does
have TSC, it's a P5 with MMX and 3Dnow but with complex pipelining
stuff taken out to minimise transistor count.
You may be thinking of National Geode SOC.

>> if someone is really interested, get teh specs from cyrix, and
>> hand-optimize
>> all the asm stuff like idct and mc in teh mpeg2 and mp3 decoders.

the powerDVD guys certainly have optimized code or a better strategy

>> Might be another reason, too. PowerDVD uses GPU-power to decode/display
>> MPEG. Does MPlayer use the GPU for MPEG-decoding?

yes and no, hardware decoding can be turned off in powerDVD, display results
are similar but cpu and northbridge are working harder (from power readings).

>> you mean that trident chip has mpeg acceleration? (MC/IDCT)
>> yes i may be possible.

yes, the YUV looks pretty easy to do, just program the registers with pointers
to YUV blocks and program scaling details, the MC/IDCT stuff, way beyond my
understanding.

>> but no linux support for these functions yet, except i810 and maybe nvidia
>> too, but no linux player (including mplayer) can use these atm

blanking needs to be module to access interupt, so tridentfb module would be
the place to start hacking and testing, thats where I will start when I get
around to it, might just need some help to figure out the complex video stuff.

In conclusion, powerDVD does a better job than mplayer and now with a
linux version availiable, the difference bewteen the two is very obvious
because of the blanking issues and minimal hardware specs.
I have no interest in watching DVD on computers, its silly, but programming
for performance is fun.

Brian