[MPlayer-users] What -vo option should I use?

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

Hi RC!

 On 2007.03.24 at 12:58:26 -0700, RC wrote next:

> I never understood why that's accepted wisdom.  I have yet to see a
> single case where vidix is even as fast as xv (or gl).
> 
> I've tried on Linux 2.4x and FreeBSD 6 with most of the cards I have:
> 
> Geforce4 MX440 AGP
> Geforce4 MX420 PCI
> ATI Rage128 (Fury Pro) AGP
> ATI Rage 128 PCI
> ATI Rage Mobility PCI
> ATI Mach 64 PCI
> S3 Savage AGP
> 
> What could I possibly be missing?

On all radeon cards that I used (7000, 8500, 9800) xvidix was at least
as fast as xv, usually a little bit faster. Since xvidix works as
directly as possible, I doubt you can get lower CPU usage when using xv
(which usually is pretty the same way of rendering video, but though
some wrapper code in X11 and video driver).

Also xvidix works when you have xv disabled (with older radeon cards
using fglrx driver and "opengl overlay" option turned on). xvidix also
has much better quality than xv with a lot of cards when using fglrx
driver - xv uses nearest-neighbor scaling for chroma, which sucks
(purely a driver bug, vidix doesn't care about that).

Unfortunately, vidix is pretty useless with all modern (R4xx, R5xx)
radeon cards; only vidix from vidix.sf.net supports them, but mplayer
doesn't use it (yet).

As about gl:yuv modes, they can be either faster or slower than
xvidix/xv. In my experience, they are a little bit slower, but can be
faster when a lot of subtitles (osd) are rendered on hi-resolution
video. On 1080p, xv can eat huge amount of CPU when rendering subtitles,
gl doesn't suffer from this.

-- 

Vladimir