[MPlayer-users] How to play 1080i HDTV material

[Adam Nielsen]

> that warning was removed at least 3 weeks ago; not much was added but
> at least this proves that you should upgrade your mplayer.

Good point.  How time flies ;-)  Hopefully that annoying XV bug has been
fixed now, I'm getting tired of loading mplayer 10 to 15 times before
the XV window is displayed ;-)  I shall grab the CVS version now...

> Do other players play smoothly that content?

I don't have any other players installed - mplayer is the only one I
use :-)

> With my p4 2.4/800 only windvd 4 (sorry) can play smoothly 1920x1088
> clips (didn't measure how long it lasts).

Well this lasts less than a second before it plays up, and I'm running
an XP2800+/333 - I'm fairly sure it's not the CPU though.

> Did you try -vc ffmpeg12 ?

No difference.  I do get extra error messages during the corrupt bits,
but I've now found out they're not really related (more on that later.)

> About the corruption: are you sure it's not due to poor DVB reception?

It's definitely not a reception issue, all the SDTV channels on the same
frequencies are fine and there's plenty of signal.  I've done some more
experimenting and when playing the MPEG-TS file from disk it seems fine
(80% CPU) but if I stream the signal (using dvbstream) that's when the
corruption occurs.  It seems that mplayer is very slow when playing the
streamed data (e.g. starting at 25fps and very quickly dropping until a
few seconds into playback it only displays one frame every few seconds,
if that.)  I'm not sure why mplayer is so slow (even with -cache 8192)
but it seems that because of this slowness some of the streamed data is
lost and that's what's causing the 'blocky' corruption.

So the problem now appears to be:  Why can't mplayer properly play HDTV
material over an RTP connection?  (When it works fine with SDTV and the
network connections are more than capable.)

Thanks,
Adam.