[MPlayer-dev-eng] Status of CoreAVC (last time) and using win32 codecs on x86_64

[Alan Nisota]

Well, I continue to get a lot of mail about using CoreAVC with mplayer, 
so I thought I'd post a status update.
I have failed to get any but the most trivial patches included in the 
mplayer code, and all the work I did splitting the patches up into 
little pieces just makes installation harder for users who will have to 
manually patch anyway.
Since I have continued to develop the code and don't want to spam the 
list with 12 patches each time I do an update, I have started a project 
for using CoreAVC on linux here:

http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/

The project is new, and I haven't flushed everything out yet, but 
included is (or will be for what is not there today) a forked copy of 
mplayer's 'loader' directory supporting CoreAVC along with 
patches/instructions on how to incorporate the code into mplayer, 
MythTV, and Xine.

Mplayer does not seem to have the capability to deal with the fact that 
CoreAVC does the deinterlacing internally, and so I have been unable to 
make mplayer work with interlaced AVC streams, but MythTV and Xine can 
both handle it.  I have no plans to try to fix mplayer for this.

I have also found a (crude) solution to using 32bit Windows codecs on 
x86_64 systems.  I have created a 'dshowserver' app which can be built 
statically and use shared-memory to pass relevant info back-and-forth to 
the player (which can thus be compiled for the native platform).  I 
haven't yet created the patch to use it with mplayer (though it should 
be ready soon), but it works fine with MythTV.  It also isn't limited to 
CoreAVC; and win32 video codec should work with it.  I did not implement 
dmo or Audio codec support though it wouldn't be hard.

Anyhow, I won't take up anymore bandwidth on this topic here.  If you 
have questions, either e-mail me or file an issue over at the project page.