[MPlayer-users] Playing QHD (3840x2160) material with mplayer

[Dean S. Messing]

On Apr 11, 2008, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> You could try using -vo gl:yuv=X with various X values or -vo xvidix (see
> man mplayer), but there are other limiting factors as well.

and

On 11 Apr 2008, Reimar Doeffinger wrote:
> At this resolution, I think at best some really new cards will be able
> to handle it via -vo gl, probably only -vo gl2 will work. And it
> certainly should not be that much faster that x11.

I finally got a few minutes to try both of your suggestions.
None come close to playing QHD at 24 fps. There were certainly
speed differences between -vo gl:yuv=X for X==0 compared to the
other values (which were all faster) but all are slower
that -vo x11.

I am baffled by two things:

1)    As mplayer sucks the video off of disk the first time around
      I would expect to see the glrellm memory meter (Fedora 6) increase,
      but I don't.  Once the disk activity drops to zero mplayer speeds up
      form 2 or 3 fps to ~14, so it is clearly playing from memory.
      The meter shows that I'm using maybe 15% of the memory before
      calling mplayer.  The clip is 2.4GB long and i have 4GB of memory
      so the meter should move.  But it doesn't.

2)    It turns out I _can_ play a few frames at 24 fps or faster
      using `animate' from ImageMagick.  The problem is that ImageMagick
      is a memory pig: a single QHD frame is 24.8MB but it eats more
      than 5 times that amount w/in ImageMagick.

      Nonetheless, it would seem that since it is able to ship the pixels
      to the display panel, the system is fundamentally capable of it.

I wrote down the system specs in a previous message in this thread:
<http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2008-April/072641.html>

Thanks again for any help you provide!

Dean