[MPlayer-users] Windows binaries

[Phil Stracchino]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 02:15:19AM +0200, Arpi wrote:
> > For some formats.  MpegTV still drops less frames than mplayer on 
> > equivalent hardware, for MPEG video.
> 
> what hardware? p100 ? yes. it does. 

K6-III/450, actually.  With 3DNow.  But without hardware YUV support for
my video card, because AccelX doesn't have XFree86's DGA extension.  I
could probably have hardware YUV if I ran XFree86, but, let me be blunt
here, XFree86's support for MGA64W-based cards (Matrox Millennium and
Millennium II) has always been terrible, and it's just not worth the 
eye strain.

> mpegtv quality sucks, it's overoptimized asm/mmx code with very buggy idct.

Overoptimized how?  Quality depends on your metric.  At 320x240, there's
visually almost nothing to choose between mplayer and mtv.  Display
quality and frame rate are both pretty much indistinguishable.  I'm
guessing this'd continue to hold true, on this hardware, up to 360x240,
maybe 400x300.  Go up to 640x272 and mtv continues to display every frame,
hovering around 98% CPU usage, while mplayer runs at about 80% CPU but
produces noticeably jumpy video as a result of dropping so many frames.

> mplayer is optimized for high-end hardware, i mean 400+ mhz with mmx and
> 3dnow/sse, and a good videocard with yuv support. ah, and i almost forgot:
> it's free.

Indeed it is.  But high-end hardware isn't, and most people still don't 
have it.  1GHz-plus processors are not yet ubiquitous.

Don't misunderstand me, I agree mplayer is the most versatile player out 
there, and probably the best for the formats it supports, except for MPEG.
For MPEG, if you don't have the very latest high-zoot hardware, mplayer 
doesn't keep up with mtv at large frame sizes.

But hey, look what we're saying here:  *ONE* commercial player outperforms
mplayer, for *one* format, for large frame sizes only, and even there,
mplayer can catch up given fast enough hardware.  That's really not very
damn much of a weakness to admit to.  :)


> > It does pretty much look like the versatility king right now, though.  Now 
> > if only we could get Sorenson to release enough specs to write a codec ...
> hehe. you're dreaming...

Hey, dreams are free too.  :)


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