[MPlayer-users] TV output cards

[Michael Hunold]

Hello Paul,

>>- You need to know that the card is a hardware mpeg-decompressor, so it 
>>can only show mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 streams by default, ie. for watching dvds 
>>  this is completely ok. The only solution to watch divx movies however, 
>>is to decode the video and then to recode it to mpeg-1 on-the-fly. Of 
>>course you need some computing power to do this...
>>
>>
> I currently have an 1,4GHz Athlon machine, I would think it would be
> able to re-encode divx's to mpeg (or am I wrong?)


Yeah, that's definitely enough. More than enough... I think the lower 
bound would be even below a Duron 700.

>>- At the moment, the dxr3 ouput plugin for mplayer does not fully work. 
>>The video is choppy and not a fun to watch. But the plugin is actively 
>>maintained by David Holm who is working on this issue. Hopefully this 
>>problem will be solved soon.
>>
> This sounds like serious trouble. But as with any Open Source software,
> I might be able to give a hand, in one way or another.


No, it's not that serious -- David is working really hard and with his 
latest changes (available in the current CVS version of the dxr3 driver 
and mplayer) it's almost perfect. The video is very smooth now -- no 
choppiness any more!

Hooray! 8-)

The last thing remaining is that the audio / video sync is still a 
little off.

>>For avis, I'm not quite sure. I have some weird avis here, for which the 
>>"xv" ouput computes the correct aspect ratio, while the "dxr3" output is 
>>completely messed up. But I did not want to bother David with this, 
>>until he finsihed fixing the most urgent bugs.
>>
> Well, it sounds like that dxr3 cards will have a decent output from
> mplayer within too long time. And again, maybe I can even help out
> somewhere ;)


This problem has vanished with the latest version, too. My avis now play 
fine. (FYI: they were encoded from tv with a resolution  768x288, but 
the playback should be 768x576 -- the dxr3 driver did not honour the 
aspect ratio correctly)

> Cheers,
> Paul Fleischer


I noticed that's currently not possible to display subtitles with the 
dxr3 driver. But I don't know if it's a limitation of the card (does it 
work under Windoze?) or the driver...

CU
Michael.