[MPlayer-users] vidix on an AMD Radeon HD 6310

[Stephen Mollett]

Hi,

On 4 February 2012, 14:21, <lynx.abraxas at freenet.de> wrote:
> ... I’d like to play videos full screen, with as little load to  the  cpu  as
> possible and without X.
> My  8  years  old  laptop  (radeon  fire 9000 mobility, p4, running linux from
> scratch) got stolen, so I’m trying to get back to only 20‐30%  CPU  load  when
> viewing a DVD,DVB‐T or some x264 video with my new one running gentoo.

I'd say that X is your best bet for achieving this, so you may have to compromise on the "no X" requirement.

If you're really adamant that you don't want a GUI on your laptop, you can simply install xorg-server and xinit and have a small wrapper script around mplayer that uses xinit to fire up an X server on demand. (I use a similar kind of ultra-minimal X setup on my music-player laptop - an old 300MHz Pentium II Celeron - to just have Clementine running full-screen.)

My 2004-vintage Pentium-M laptop with basic Intel 855GME graphics has no difficulty playing DVDs and the like (it can even play 720p H.264 from BBC iPlayer) through X via '-vo xv' (the graphics chip looks after scaling the video to full-screen so I don't need software scaling with '-vf scale'), even with KDE4 soaking up a boatload of resources. Your laptop is obscenely powerful compared to this, so it should lap up anything you can throw at it. You may even be able to use your APU's video decoding engine through the AMD fglrx driver (use VIDEO_CARDS=fglrx) to do the decoding and deinterlacing on the graphics hardware instead of using the CPU. (I'm not familiar with the modern AMD graphics chips, having "gone over to the dark side" a few years ago, but I'd imagine that their capabilities are fairly similar to those of recent nVidia ones.)

Hope this helps,
Stephen
 
--  I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on tape somewhere!