[MPlayer-users] Using the D510MO Mini-ITX platform for full HD playback

[Uoti Urpala]

On Fri, 2011-01-07 at 13:17 -0600, Rolf Ernst wrote:
> I run plenty of Linux boxes and Windows side by side and the Linux video 
> drivers are simple horrible throughout and mplayer does not do the best 
> job decoding. I have a Win7 system with an 8500 onboard chip which is 
> not exactly HD quality and a AMD 4500 CPU (dual core low power 
> consumption) but both the Arcsoft and CoreAVC codecs let me play back 
> full 1920x1080p without dropping frames including the dreaded killa 
> sample. None of the open source codecs can, not mplayer, not VLC, not 
> ffdshow. One of the reasons I dropped XBMC in favor of Win 7 MC was 
> because Linux HD hardware requirements are so much stiffer because of 
> the inefficiency of software and drivers. OS may be free but hardware 
> required more expensive.

What Linux software have you tried? Only MPlayer svn with its
single-threaded decoding? If so it's not surprising you find performance
disappointing, but that's far from the best performance possible for
"Linux video". AFAIK CoreAVC is somewhat faster than multithreaded
decoding with FFmpeg-mt, but not by all that much in most cases. And
AFAIK driver problems do not significantly limit the speed of VDPAU
hardware decoding if that's what you use.

> I am plain stating a fact here, please don't kill the messenger. I have 
> played with many configurations and a variety of hardware 
> configurations. I cannot play back full HD on Windows using mplayer 
> using a 9750 quadcore and a 9800 GTX (60 fps, that is)

I'm not sure about Windows builds, but that hardware is capable of
playing 60 fps full HD content on Linux with no problems whatsoever.

However trying to play it with MPlayer svn could fail for two reasons:
1) decoding speed (for software decoding, only a single thread could be
used in most cases)
2) most VOs only support playback of content with a frame rate lower
than the refresh rate of the display - thus you can't play 60 fps
content on a typical 60 Hz LCD monitor.

If you build a player from
git://repo.or.cz/mplayer-build.git
that should play such content without problems. It uses multithreaded
decoding (manual configuration is no longer needed to use that in most
cases, it should just work) which should be plenty fast enough on that
processor. And -vo vdpau does not have framerate limits like in MPlayer
svn, so 60 Hz content should work regardless of monitor refresh rate (at
least as long as you don't force another VO instead of the default
vdpau).