[MPlayer-users] Play movies without any gap

[The Wanderer]

Rich Felker wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 06:30:04PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Rich Felker wrote:

>>> x11, gl, and gl2 are all broken vo's that no one should be using.
>>> They're slow and very low quality. If xvidix is broken with
>>> -fixed-vo, it should be fixed asap. Or just use cvidix..
>> 
>> FWIW, neither xvidix nor cvidix works for me; I once got them to
>> work, briefly, by installing dhahelper, but they stopped working
>> again shortly thereafter (and reinstalling it didn't help). I don't
>> remember exactly how they failed before, but I just tested xvidix
>> both as root and as a normal user; as root it displays a
>> solid-green window (presumably the colorkey), as a normal user it
>> spits out the usual flood of "Error occurred during pci scan:
>> Operation not permitted" errors and fails to initialize. cvidix as
>> root produces no apparent errors, but also no video; cvidix as a
>> normal user gives the same errors as xvidix.
> 
> Is this only with -fixed-vo? I use cvidix on my laptop all the time
> with -fixed-vo and it works perfectly. No root whatsoever
> (svgalibhelper).

Nope, this is with anything (actually I'd never tried it with -fixed-vo)
- or at least it was; I tried again just now, with the same command line
and from the same terminal as before, and when running as root -vo
xvidix plays the video (apparently) correctly. (cvidix still produces no
video, and for that matter no window, even when used in an xterm rather
than from the console.)

Oddly enough, if I add a second file to the same -vo xvidix command
line, it plays it in what looks like a failed fullscreen mode - the
video is not scaled, it is centered in the screen, and the rest of the
screen is somewhat staticky black. When I quit MPlayer, the screen is
garbage, and I have to switch to console and back to get the X display
back to normal .

Neither xvidix nor cvidix work when run as a normal user (just retested
to confirm), and I've got no idea where to find svgalibhelper; even
Google only gets 13 hits on the term, compared to 460+ for dhahelper,
and none of them look download-y. This was, I now recall, the problem
which installing dhahelper fixed - but that stopped working again
shortly afterwards, as I said, and reinstalling dhahelper then did
nothing.

>> I get perfectly acceptable video output with -vo xv, but from what
>> I hear not everyone necessarily will - and I wouldn't be in the
>> least surprised if many other people had the same difficulties with
>> VIDIX that I do. (Everyone else in my household certainly did, last
>> I checked.)
> 
> Yes, vidix is difficult to setup properly. However if you can, it's
> highly worth it for the speed (unless you have a matrox card, in
> which case mga_vid is all you need).

Well, although I hardly need the speed (the only times speed is an issue
are when I'm compiling something vaguely heavy, like wine, and when the
bottleneck is disk access), I'd prefer to use the fastest method which
fits my needs, and I'd like to have VIDIX working anyway; if you can
give me any more ideas of where to look, I'd be glad to hear them.

It might be worth it to work up a step-by-step "how to get VIDIX working
on your computer" guide for the documentation, since from what you say
every other hardware-agnostic VO method except xv is inadvisable...

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.