[MPlayer-users] Re: best graphical card for MPlayer

[Primate Mésmero]

Hi there,

I have read all these messages about graphic cards for Mplayer and I want to share my experience with different cards. I am using Linux since June, so if I say a nonsense don´t take me into account :).

I have Mandrake 9.1 running in an Athlon XP 2400+ at 2GHz (no overclocking yet) with 256 MB RAM, and Mplayer 0.91 compiled from source tarball, Kernel 2.4.21, XFree 4.3.0 and Fluxbox 0.1.14 window manager.

At first I used an old riva TNT2 PCI card. With the "nv" free driver that comes in the distro, I didn´t get Xv support for Mplayer, so I downloaded the binary drivers from nVidia and I got Xv, OpenGL and DRI. I have used it for two months and it worked perfectly.

I didn´t mean to change the card, but I found a very cheap Ati Radeon 7000 and bought it. I tried the GATOS driver that comes with the distro and it has Xv, OpenGL and DRI support, so I continued using it (more surprissingly, the card behaves strangely in W98, but I don´t mind, now I prefer Linux). 

Playing a DVD with MPlayer (-vo xv) at full screen I have a CPU usage of 25%. Is it normal?

I don´t know if TV out works, because as I don´t need it, I have not tried it.

Regarding picture quality I can not say which card is better, sorry. In any case I suppose that this issue is subjective.

I have read in a message posted to the list (I don´t remember who wrote it), that these drivers don´t use all the features of tha Ati cards. Please, can anyone explain which features the drivers don´t use? I have Xv, OpenGl and DRI at least.

As a summary, I think that the two brands are similar, but as I have used Linux (and Mplayer) only for three months I could be wrong.

Regards.

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