[MPlayer-users] video scaling doesn't work

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 11.02.2014, at 21:38, Grant <emailgrant at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> so I can either prescale with mencoder/ffmpeg or try to get mplayer to
>>>>> scale on the fly.  This works nicely except the video only appears in
>>>>> the top 35% of the screen:
>>>>> 
>>>>> mplayer -vf scale=1360:-1 -fs file.mp4
>>>> 
>>>> You'll want something like "-vf scale=1360:-2,expand=aspect=16/9"
>>>> but the saying about lipstick and pig applies...
>>> 
>>> That scales it perfectly although performance isn't up to snuff as expected.
>>> 
>>>> Also I don't know what code you are using, but since this code in the
>>>> comment right on top:
>>>> http://cgit.openembedded.org/openembedded/plain/recipes/mplayer/files/vo_omapfb.c
>>>> explicitly says that _downscaling_ doesn't work that should
>>>> mean that upscaling certainly should work.
>>>> (Note: there is some ancient code there, so that link is not meant as
>>>> endorsement...)
>>> 
>>> I've been using the xf86-video-omapfb driver but I haven't tried -vo
>>> omapfb.
>> 
>> It would have saved some confusion if you had said that the first time I asked.
> 
> I apologize.
> 
>>> How can I get mplayer to consider that omapfb C file at
>>> compile time?  Does it just need to be in a certain folder in the
>>> source?
>> 
>> There's also a diff that needs to be applied, and even then I have some doubts it will work.
>> The code misses about 5 years of updates to libvo functionality..
> 
> I doubt the diff would even apply.  The only other thing I can think
> of would be using mencoder to prescale every video I watch up to
> 1360x768.  Is there a simple command for highest quality there?

Hm, at that resolution the risk is decoding itself will be too slow. For highest quality without getting too large and causing bottlenecks elsewhere, using H.264 would be best, but it is also slowest.
I also looked into it again, installing Ubuntu 14.04. What is the result? Well, omapfb no longer exists, instead you have to use "omap" xorg driver, which does not support XVideo at all.
In addition, the kernel API was completely changed to require KMS, so that MPlayer's fbdev does no longer work. So yay, they did another rewrite, making things yet more broken than ever before, and any effort you make to fix it will be broken soon anyway.
So once more my conclusion is that the best thing to do with a beagleboard (and pandaboard is only marginally better) really is throwing it onto the trash.
Even such crappy alternatives like cubieboard are
1) half the pice
2) rather faster and come with eMMC
3) have actually working 3D drivers, and basic (but working!) VDPAU support (basic because the overlay features are not really working, not to mention the more advanced ones, but it sure works for a XVideo replacement).