[MPlayer-users] mc and idct hardware acceleration

[Andrea Sansottera]

I've just subscribed to this mailing list, as a fan of the MPlayer 
project. It is the fastest and most scalable video player I've ever seen!

Anyway, I want to tell you something about my experience with it, sinche 
I read the following thread on the web archive of this mailing list:
    "MPlayer 0.90rc4, radeon 9000, MC, IDCT"

What's wrong with hardware accellerate MC and IDCT? Nothing at all, it 
speeds up DVD playback in a wonderfull way! At least on my computer.
It is a Pentium 2 300 MHz, 160 MB ram, AGP 2x slot. This is my experience:

Old video card = ATI 3d RAGE PRO (YUV conversion and scaling, motion 
compensation)
    Windows: I cannot play MPEG4 (DivX), all players are to slow using 
the DirectX overlay (even MPlayer for Windows)
    Linux: I can easily play MPEG4 using XVIDIX or XV
    Windows: DVD playback is even worse than MPEG4 playback!
    Linux: I cannot play DVD, MPlayer drops a huge number of frames... 
it seems to SLOW!

New video card = NVIDIA GEFORCE 4 MX 440 (YUV conversion and scaling, 
motion compensation, idct)
    Windows: I can play MPEG4
    Linux: I still can play MPEG4 using XV
    Windows: DVD playback is still not very good
    Linux: I cannot play DVD with smoothness using XV.... with "-vo 
XVMC" I can!!!

So, the only way I can play DVD smoothly on a Pentium2 is to use a 
graphic board which is"full hardware mpeg2 decoder", linux, xvmc, and 
mplayer with "-vo xmvc".

And see, it is not such a strange hardware configuration!

A friend of mine (he is in carbon copy)  has a Celeron overclocked up to 
666 MHz and an ATI Radeon 7500 on an AGP 2x slot. A faster CPU, but not 
such a different system compared to mine!
Well, using Windows he can see DVD but not very well (CPU at 90%-100%, 
sometimes slowdowns in playback)... even if windows is using MC and 
IDCT. On Linux, with XV he cannot play DVD smoothly ... too high 
framedropping rate! I believe that, if a libXVMCrv200 existed, he could 
play DVD as well as me using linux, mplayer and "-vo xvmc".

Conclusion: MC and IDCT seem very usefult in my experience! If I were 
able I'd wrote an xvmc library for my friend and others similar cpu/gpu 
owners...