[MPlayer-users] Was mplayer better in 2006 ???

[Emmanuel Anne]

Hi !

Maybe this subject has been discussed before, I didn't take the time to
browse all the archives here.
Anyway here is the problem : maybe you heard about the freebox in France, it
broadcasts some hd streams, and some "low bitrate" h264 streams.
With current mplayer version and default configuration (no special command
line options), if you try to read one of these streams, you'll either get
nothing, a crash, or no sound at all.
Adding -demuxer lavf can help, but it makes the thing quite unstable and
seems to add some problems.
vlc has been able to play these streams without problem for ages.

Now I happen to have an old mplayer version here because I update an old mac
mini to be useful nowdays, and there is a version of mplayer from 2006 in
it. It uses an internal libfaad2 version, 2.1 beta apparently.
Anyway when using this very old version with default configuration and
special option on the command line, all these streams play fine !
Quite a shocking discovery for me. I'll probably have to use this old
version for the tv recording box now...
Ok, I'll admit it displays a few warnings on the console like :
[h264 @ 0xd800f0]MBAFF + spatial direct mode is not implemented
but they are harmless and everything is fine except that.

I post this here in case you didn't know, and in case you have an idea to
make the recent mplayer versions usable in this kind of situation...

An example of one of these hd streams :
  VIDEO H264(pid=68) AUDIO AAC(pid=69) NO SUBS (yet)!  PROGRAM N. -3778
low bitrate :
VIDEO H264(pid=68) AUDIO AAC(pid=80) NO SUBS (yet)!  PROGRAM N. 1646

I can post more details if you need them !