[MPlayer-users] Use Linux PC as HD Movie Player

[Phil Rhodes]

The graphics card makes practically no difference, unless very specific circumstances arise in which it has an on board h.264 decoder. It can be quite difficult to get this to work, and in any case it doesn't have anything to do with your scenario. 

It sounds like you're seeing what's often referred to as "tearing", where you are indeed seeing half of one frame and half of another. It happens when the player finishes decoding a frame and updates the video output partway through the monitor displaying an image. 

I'm not sure why the behaviour would be different on different displays. Fine control of monitors in linux is a bit of a black art at the best of times, and there are a multitude of settings to do with X, the video card, its relationship with the display device, and mplayer itself. You're generally looking for options referring to "vsync" or "vertical blanking", which are events that occur in the time between the end of displaying one frame and the start of displaying another, which is the point at which the video player should update the new frame.

You can also try different mplayer video output modules (use -vo on the command line, presumably it's an option in GUI implementations), as they may have different behaviour.

P