[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH]Prefer vdpau over xv if available

[Dan Oscarsson]

On 2009-03-30 at 12:44 +0200 Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:00:40PM +0200, Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:
> > Attached patch would revert r28688.
> > Since I expect it to be controversial, I'll not commit before comments 
> > were made.
> 
> "Why" is the obvious question. Xv has been tested for a long time, and
> with this change crashes in VDPAU preinit will break MPlayer with
> default configuration completely.

As mplayer changes all the time I cannot say that I have tested the
latest version very much, but I have never had a crash due to vdpau.

The nicest thing would be for mplayer to select vdpau for vo and for
hardware decoding, without me having to give a vo and vc option.

There is more work needed to be done before vdpau is really good.

Both vdpau and xv fails when displaying video who have same refresh rate
as the screen. xv fails by overwriting memory shared with the X server
resulting in tearing (I have a patch for that but focused to getting my
fix into vdpau first). using vdpau audio gets out of sync and frames are
dropped.

If you have a 60Hz screen, use speed 2.5 on a 24hz movie and see what
happens. Using current shapsnot I get a status line like:
A:  81.0 V:  80.7 A-V:  0.331 ct:  0.000   0/  0  0% 97%  1.7% 1639 0
2.50x

Audio drifting out of sync, many frames dropped and 97% time used for
display.

With my patches I get:
A: 215.2 V: 215.2 A-V: -0.000 ct:  0.000   0/  0  0%  0%  1.9% 0 0 21

Audio in sync, and only 21 frames dropped in vo_vdpau.

So there is more to be done.

But I would not mind having vdpau be selected by default, though it
would be even better if the vc option for hardware decoding was selected
too. But I agree with Reimar that xv is better tested and maybe should
still be default. It depends on when we are going to do the next
release. I am only using vdpau now with my latest patches, and so far it
looks very good. Not making vdpau be autoselected in mplayer now and
having the next release in 1-2 years time, is to long time to wait for
it. Even if vdpau is not seen as good enough now, I would expect it to
be very soon, and then users will expect vdpau to be selected by
default.