[MPlayer-users] -nograbpointer problem (NOVIRUS)

[Adam Nielsen]

> Hrmph, this solves the problem. Thanks. I tried through the various -vo 
> options some time ago, and sdl worked on more machines so I settled for 
> that and didn't look any further.

Yes, I imagine SDL is more compatible/widely used, but xv seems to be faster 
thanks to hardware acceleration (basing that on absolutely no facts at all, 
though ;-))

> Could some kind soul, in *simple* words, explain the actual differences
> between the various outputs? Being a network-centric type, that's an
> area where I Just Don't Get It from the manpages etc.

They're just different methods of displaying the picture on the screen.  All 
modern video cards offer a hardware accelerated method of drawing video on 
the screen, and this is what the xv driver takes advantage of.  But if you 
use a video card that doesn't support this (or the driver hasn't implemented 
it) then xv won't work.

So to allow you to watch video on these non-xv cards, there are other fallback 
methods you can use, such as SDL.  There are many other reasons why you'd 
choose a different video output method, but basically they're all there so 
people can use their preferred method for whatever reason they choose.  If it 
doesn't matter to you, then any of them are fine, although it'd be a good 
idea to see which is the most efficient first (i.e. lowest CPU load) and 
stick to that.

A good example is the -vo x11 method.  This one works anywhere X-Windows does, 
but because of this extra compatibility it's *much* slower than -vo xv (so 
you wouldn't want to use it unless you had no other choice.)

Hopefully that helps to explain it a bit ;-)

Cheers,
Adam.