[ILUG] Playing DVDs with MPlayer

[Roger Irwin]

I have been playing since I posted my last message. My sound card is a
ForteMedia FM801 (SB16 clone) that I have working using Alsa 5.11.

Alsa offers a dummy sound card option that didn't me make the slightest
bit of differance to the quality of DVD playback other than I don't get
sound. This leads me to suppect that PCI bandwith as suggested on here
isn't my problem. My Video card is APG and there for the only traffic on
the PCI BUS is sound?

Is having this in my /var/log/XFree86.0.log relivent?
Symbol xf86CreateI2CBusRec from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/r128_drv.o is unresolved!
Symbol drmScatterGatherAlloc from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/r128_drv.o is unresolved!
Symbol drmScatterGatherFree from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/r128_drv.o is unresolved!

I Think that DRI is working as I have /proc/dri but don't have anything
saying that it is in /var/log/XFree86.0.log

I have also tried all the video modes on MPlayer listed below and all work
much the same for speed. I'm running MPlayer 0.50 that was released a few
weeks ago and found it much better than 0.18 that I was using. I have also
used vlc and found the playback speed to be much the same. vlc has a better
(GUI) user interface and much quicker CSS decode key.

The only conclusion that I can draw at the moment is that my ATI XPERT
2000 isn't fast enough for 100% DVD playback under linux. I suppect that
this is a driver issue as I'm sure that it would work fine if I had the
will to install windows. This card also offers some hardware DVD decoding
under windows but have been unable to find any linux drivers.

I have overclocked my system BUS to 145MHz (from 133MHz) which has helped
but still not as good as I would like.

Roger

Available video output drivers:
        xmga    X11 (Matrox G200/G400 overlay in window using /dev/mga_vid)
        mga     Matrox G200/G400 overlay (/dev/mga_vid)
        syncfb  Matrox G200/G400 Synchronous framebuffer (/dev/syncfb)
        xv      X11/Xv
        x11     X11 ( XImage/Shm )
        gl      X11 (OpenGL)
        gl2     X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
        dga     DGA ( Direct Graphic Access V2.0 )
        sdl     SDL YUV/RGB/BGR renderer (SDL v1.1.7+ only!)
        fbdev   Framebuffer Device
        svga    SVGAlib
        png     PNG file
        null    Null video output
        odivx   OpenDivX AVI File writer
        pgm     PGM file
        md5     MD5 sum
        mpegpes Mpeg-PES file


On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Gavin McCullagh wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Ronny B wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 09:00:37PM +0000, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> > > The theories expressed to me by several people were poor sound card support.
> > > This (if I've understood correctly) can be very wasteful of your PCI
> > > bandwidth.  I personally am using an Aureal Vortex 1 sound card, the support
> > > for which was somewhat hacked together after the company went bust without
> > > giving any info about the card.  I have to find a soundblaster or similar
> > > well supported card to see if it helps.  Anyway, I havn't done that yet.
> > I was not able to play DVDs until I upgraded from a K6-2 450 to a Duron 750.
> > In tests (MP3 & other encoding, just running resource hogs like *anything* in
> > win98), this CPU is about two to three times as fast.
> >
> > When playing DVD, my CPU usage rarely goes beyond 30%, typically staying around
> > 25%. I had an NVidia GeForce2 MX and an SB Live! on both configurations, so I
> > would say that P2 of yours should be capable of playing DVDs with MPlayer.
>
> I have played DVDs in win98 with hw decoder so I know the machine can do
> it.  I've seen guys on who were involved early on talk about playing DVDs
> on the likes of 300MHz Celerons so mine (not to mention Roger's the Athlon
> 1400).  Naturally this needs linux to equate with all the linux components
> (hw & sw) in terms of performance though.  Having looked, it appears that
> my sound card has ceased development (and I can't blame them to be honest),
> so I'm looking at testing with a SB Live, before going out and buying one.
> When I get round to it I'll let you know how it goes.
>
> > I agree with people who say it's a matter of support - but it's also worth
> > getting the CVS version of MPlayer.
>
> Oh, FWIW I use a mplayer debian package from:
>
> http://marillat.free.fr/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/
>
> Gavin
>