[MPlayer-users] 2 different problems - flicker & speed (long)

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 06:21:33PM +0100, tdc wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hi,
> I've run into some problems with mplayer.
> After upgrading kernel from 2.4.18 to 2.4.20 and in the same time 
> upgrading mplayer from 'CVS-021209-12:18-3.0.4' to 
> 'CVS-030121-15:23-3.0.4' the video playback start to 'flash'. Sometimes 
> (doesn't matter which file I run) there is something like empty frame 
> displayed. When using '-vo xv' as output, the frame is usually black, 
> but sometimes it's noisy and looks like it's displaying some memory 
> garbage (ie. when there is static background and person is moving in the 
> front, in the empty frame the background is black and contours of the 
> moving person are filled with yellow / magenta / blue blocky noise). 
> When using '-vo vesa:vidix' the 'empty' frame is in most cases yellow 
> instead of black. First I thought it's some mplayer's fault, but when i 
> tried old binary, these errors occured again. Now I think it can be the 
> kernel.
> The machine is PII/350 + 128MB RAM, ATI Mach64 AGP 8MB running XFree86 
> 4.2.0. Not a high-end machine, but before kernel + mplayer upgrade, it 
> was able to play without these annoying empty frames. Sure, sometimes it 
> was slow to play fast-moving scenes, but it displayed no such frames. 
> Now it happens with any video-out mode (at least the only 'usable' ones 
> for me: 'xv', 'vesa:vidix'); more often when the scene is difficult to 
> decode. I've tested several combination of switches (nortc, softsleep, 
> dr, noslices,.... as I suspect this to be some timing problem), on both 
> versions of mplayer and I'm still unable to get it work the 'old' way. 
> OTOH it looks the new mplayer now uses less average CPU when decoding: 
> <50% total.

Sounds like you compiled your kernel without support for
mmx/sse/whatever. Are you sure you selected the right cpu type in
menuconfig?

> Second (and for me now more painful) problem is more generic. I obtained 
> a 700 MHz Duron (my first AMD machine ever) to be used as player instead 
> of the PII/350. There was some crappy nVidia card (TNT2 32MB AGP), which 
> I've replaced it with the 8MB PCI Mach64 card (almost same as above, 
> only this is PCI version as si don't have spare AGP one). What was my 
> surprise the playback was waaaay to slow for such a machine. Even 

Of course it's slow!! PCI is super slow. If you want to play movies
you really want an AGP card.

Rich