[MPlayer-users] Play movies without any gap

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 02:43:00AM +0400, Vladimir Mosgalin wrote:
> Hi Rich Felker!
> 
>  On 2005.07.18 at 17:46:01 -0400, Rich Felker wrote next:
> 
> > > It works only with several VOs. However, it doesn't work with xvidix
> > > (the best vo for radeon card owners), and doesn't work with x11.
> > > It generally works, but has problems with video aspect ratio for some
> > > other vo, like gl and gl2. So basically, it's very buggy and almost
> > > unusable..
> > 
> > x11, gl, and gl2 are all broken vo's that no one should be using.
> 
> x11 is broken?

Yes. It tears (i.e. very low video quality) and there's no way to fix
the problem. It's fundamental.

> But isn't it most generic and simplest non-accelerated
> driver, besides, isn't it default?

No, xv is default, and x11 driver is quite the opposite of "simple".
cvidix is the simplest driver, or else mga.

> Anyway, I already reported bugs with fixed-vo 2 years ago and about 10
> months ago, they were even reproduced, but never fixed. And I don't
> remember other people complaining about them. So I guess a very small
> amount of people plays several files at once, and no one cares.

Well cvidix works for me with multiple files..

> > They're slow and very low quality. If xvidix is broken with -fixed-vo,
> 
> x11 gives the highest quality with bicubic scaler,

No. You can use bicubic scaler with any vo you like; however actually
for many things it's lower quality. Bicubic scaling of the chroma
planes is blatently incorrect since they're sampled at half the rate
and the second-neighbors used in bicubic resampling usually have no
correlation to the output you're trying to get. Bicubic luma/bilinear
chroma or just bilinear for everything is generally better quality.

Anyway, again the quality of the scaler is irrelevant to the quality
of the vo. The problem with x11 is that it tears and there's no way to
fix that.

> and gl is ultimate
> solution for low-resolution video with subtitles, since it renders them
> to fullscreen resolution (well, x11 too, but gl is faster).

gl may or may not tear (afaik it usually does), but it's generally
slow compared to overlay-based vo's. And if you have a low-res movie
like 320x240, just soft scale up to 640x480 and then the subtitles
will look fine.

> > it should be fixed asap. Or just use cvidix..
> 
> What, switch to console to play some clip? You must be joking...

cvidix works fine on top of X too... It works anywhere.

> With xvidix it's broken in several places. The most annoying is
> switching to next video while in fullscreen. It er.. I just can't
> describe it easily, most likely it's WM-dependent too (I'm using
> wmaker). I'll probably try to describe the funny things happening if
> they will prove to be WM/video card/driver specific, but not right now.
> 
> Since there is workaround (switch to window mode before going to next
> file, and don't play files with funny aspect ratios, they may break
> future videos - but that's another bug), using fixed-vo is just
> annoying, not really impossible.

Hmm, this should not happen. Maybe someone who knows about this stuff
would be interested in re-opening the bug and trying to fix it..

Rich