[MPlayer-dev-eng] Why no default modern disc playback support?, i.e. Blu-Ray/HD

[e-t172]

Liz Wozlanik a écrit :
> Hello, MPLAYER looks like a great project.  I am wondering when it will
> fully support modern discs natively, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD?, or is
> this the wrong place to find out? :-)
>
>   
See this page : 
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=HD-DVD_Playback_Status

With the latest SVN and the appropriate patches, mplayer can play pretty 
much any HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, provided it is not decrypted first.

However, one of the major problems when playing VERY high bitrate 
content like these is that mplayer does not support GPU acceleration of 
video decoding (nVidia PureVideo, ATI Avivo, currently only supported by 
Cyberlink PowerDVD and Nero ShowTime). So it is unlikely that your 
computer will be able to play such streams without performance problems. 
This is mostly due to the fact that the ffmpeg codecs for the two major 
video formats used (H.264 and VC-1) are not "parallelized" enough to 
fully use the processing power of Dual/Quad-core machines. As a matter 
of fact, even CoreAVC, the fastest H.264 codec available, is unable to 
decode Blu-ray video in realtime on my Core 2 Duo E6600 (using latest 
Mplayer + CoreAVC patches on Windows, maybe it's better on Linux, I 
doubt it though).

I guess we'll have to wait for performance improvements in ffh264/ffvc1, 
or PureVideo/Avivo support in ffmpeg. On Windows it is possible to 
implement GPU acceleration using the Video Acceleration component of 
DirectX (but as far as I know, no ffmpeg developer is working on this 
ATM) ; on Linux however, due to the lack of driver support, this is not 
possible yet - but recent developments such as AMD/ATI releasing 
specifications for their recent GPUs makes me think this is going to change.

-- 
Etienne Dechamps / e-t172 - AKE Group

Website: http://www.e-t172.net/
Contact: e-t172 at akegroup.org

Phone: +33547414942