[MPlayer-users] old computer

[Stephen Mollett]

Hi,

On Friday 04 August 2006 18:24, Hulin Thibaud wrote:
> With the option -ao oss, it's not enough.
> But oss is not emulation of oss by alsa ?

Well, '-ao oss' would use ALSA's OSS emulation if you're using ALSA drivers 
(which you obviously are because you were using -ao alsa before); I don't 
know the details but I understand that the alsa ao driver in MPlayer is less 
mature than the oss one and therefore isn't as fast.

> About unaccelerated GFX, I don't see how try. In the link above, the
> autor suggest using a VGA driver supporting "hard DR" (VIDIX, mga_vid,
> DGA, VESA, or fbdev), but that not works for me...

Do you normally use '-vo x11' or '-vo xv' as your default? The NeoMagic 128XD 
can do XVideo (xv) which should be a bit quicker than basic X11 mode, 
especially on a slow processor, because it'll have the graphics chip look 
after the conversion from YUV colour (in the file) to RGB colour (on the 
screen) and scaling the video to fullscreen if necessary.

My old IBM ThinkPad 240 also has a NeoMagic 128XD and can play back even 
640x480 MPEG4 video quite watchably with '-vo xv' but not with '-vo x11'. 
(It's a Celeron 300, though, so it's a bit quicker. Compiling MPlayer for 
that specific processor with a recent GCC helps. It's noticeably better with 
GCC4 than it was with GCC3 on "borderline cases" where it could barely cope, 
like big DivX videos.)

Regards,
Stephen