[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPlayer Support for PPC/PPC64

[Derek E. lewis]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 10:44 +0200, Romain Dolbeau wrote:

> A G5 would be nice to improve & optimize 64 bits and/or
> SIMD support, in particular if it comes with an XLC license
> (gcc register allocator really, really sucks sometimes:
> see the comments above hadamard8_diff16x8_altivec in
> dsputil_altivec.c) as we might be able to allow compilation
> with XLC.

I tried contacting IBM awhile back about donating an xlC license to the
MPlayer project; however, I received no response.  xlC is also not
available for OS X any longer -- it is strictly for AIX and Linux,
nowadays.  I've also built MPlayer with xlC 8.0, as it supports most GCC
extensions, on non-Altivec hardware, but the performance differences
were negligble between it and gcc.  At the time, xlC had a few bugs that
were preventing me from building *all* of MPlayer with it, so this could
be the cause, as well.  IBM is also *the* worst when it comes to
addressing bugs/problems/etc. if you aren't corporate customer.

On another note, I do have a POWER3 system (PowerPC 630 w/o Altivec)
that has xlC 6.0 and 8.0 installed if anybody wants to give xlC a shot.
It is a nice compiler that is strict C99 (similar to Sun Studio in this
aspect), but also provides a number of C99 extensions, as well as GNU
extensions if you need them.  I do think complete xlC build support in
MPlayer is definitely possible.  Contact me for a shell account if
you're interested.

Thanks,

Derek E. Lewis