[MPlayer-users] Play movies without any gap

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

Hi Rich Felker!

 On 2005.07.18 at 21:00:31 -0400, Rich Felker wrote next:

> > x11 is broken?
> 
> Yes. It tears (i.e. very low video quality) and there's no way to fix
> the problem. It's fundamental.

We already discussed this.. You don't like it, but I don't mind at all.

> > 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.

Yes, except for the fact that cvidix depends on vidix lib ;)

> > > 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.

You may be right, but I don't feel the difference between these modes.
However I do see the difference between pure bilinear scaling (in
swscaler or hw scaling on some cards, i.e. nvidia ones suffered from
this) and bicubic one in swscaler. It feels like some minor details are
more noticeable/contrast with the latter one. It's not the sharpness you
get with unsharp filter, but much subtle one, which always improves the
picture. Not very much, but once you try to use it for a while, it
actually feels nicer.

Overlay on radeon cards is somewhere in between, I suspect it uses some
kind of bicubic optimization which is slightly worse than true bicubic,
or maybe it's just coefficients.

> 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.

Yes, and whether it tears or not is irrelevant to vo quality for me ;)

> 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.

I know. It's just that gl:manyfmts is fast enough and easier to use.
It doesn't tear on my system, even though that gl vsync is off in x11
config. Maybe it's because I turned "gl overlay" option is on, maybe
not. OR maybe I don't feel tearing at all anymore.

btw, just checked it: using gl:manyfmts is exactly as fast as upscaling
to 640x480.

> > > 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.

Er.. It doesn't, at least for me. In "window" mode I don't see anything,
in "fullscreen" I see window of original size with very dark picture.
Feels like half-bright luma and no chroma.

And if it works, what, you can switch to fullscreen and back and move or
resize window too? And I won't see mplayer window on another desktop? I
don't believe this...

-- 

Vladimir