[MPlayer-users] cheap video card recommendation to replace ATI, or help making it work better

[Stephen Mollett]

Hi,

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 21:47, JQ wrote:
> i'm pretty close to buying a graphics card for this machine which is
> only for watching/projecting movies and playing music.
> i think the movies i'm trying to play are pretty high quality, too (see
> mplayer output)
> cheapness is a factor, and also it has to be PCI (the machine is a dell
> optiplex PII 400Mhz) which has an ATI Rage Pro built in but mplayer
> seems sluggish on it.

Firstly, I should say that I have no experience of using MPlayer on any OS 
other than Linux, so my response will be a little Linux-centric.

I've used a lower-spec system (a Celeron 300A laptop) with MPlayer under Linux 
and had quite good results, albeit with lower-resolution (640x...) movies.

If your video driver has XVideo support, you would probably benefit from using 
it. (I have a feeling that the XFree86 ati driver doesn't support Xv; there's 
an alternative driver from the Gatos project (gatos.sf.net) which does, but 
it may be Linux-only.) Failing that, using DGA might make a difference. 
(Using Xv is the only way to get my NeoMagic-based laptop to play full-screen 
without skipping frames.)

Also, can the sound card play back at 48000Hz rather than requiring MPlayer to 
resample to 44100? (Is this perhaps a limitation of the CS4236 hardware or 
the driver?)

I would offer to try a few tweaks on a GX1 (I've got a dozen or so at work) 
but I don't know when I'm likely to find time right now...

Regards,
Stephen