Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 22:43:35 -0500 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de> Subject: Re: recommendations for mpg avi viewer requested Message-ID: <084944343030a12FE5@mail5.nc.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <200201070207.g0727KS26648@lurza.secnetix.de> References: <200201070207.g0727KS26648@lurza.secnetix.de>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sunday 06 January 2002 09:07 pm, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> wrote:
> > The only two things it doesn't do that I've noticed are quicktime (xanim
> > is still the only player I know of that does) and real video (only
> > realplayer).
>
> Yep. Even worse: Most of the better-quality QuickTimes use
> non-open codecs (such as Sorenson), so you have to boot into
> Windows. :(
>
> While real video is non-open and proprietary, too, there is
> at least a player that runs under FreeBSD without problems,
> although it doesn't seem to support any hardware acceleration.
>
> > On the other hand, it's a little bit of a pain in some ways: the GUI is
> > pretty lame: some of the controls don't work and there's no position
> > thumb or running time
>
> I don't use the GUI at all, only the hotkeys. For example,
> the cursor keys for rewind and fast forward, space for stop
> and start etc., you can also press "o" to enable or disable
> the OSD (includes running time). I think this is more
> convenient than using a GUI.
Me, too, except that I really like having an indicator of how far along it is
that is
a) outside of the picture, and
b) draggable.
The GUI on mplayer is useless enough, though, that I don't use it, either.
>
> YMMV, of course.
>
> > (for plain-old MPEGS, mtv is a lot nicer);
>
> Nope, it doesn't support scaling / acceleration (at least
> not last time I tried it), so I can't use it to play MPEGs
> fullscreen. The free command-line player (mtvp) doesn't
> even let you pause or jump forward or backward.
Well, it used to (or maybe that was back un Linux) but now when I even try to
zoom/unzoom it locks up hard so it seems to have regressed. But it has that
thumb I like so much!
> > also, if it can't
> > play the vids with your options, it just fails; for instance, I normally
> > use xy 2 (2x scale), and perhaps as a result it defaults to -vo xv
> > (X11/xv scaling), but some videos for some reason it can't decode that
> > way, so it just fails.
>
> Yep, that's somewhat annoying.
>
> By default, it tries the Xvideo extension (-vo xv), because
> this is the most efficient. However, Xvideo doesn't support
> all of the possible color space conversions. If the codec
> requires one that is not supported, it just fails.
>
> If the user didn't specify any output driver using -vo, it
> would be better to automatically fallback to -vo sdl or (if
> the SDL library fails, too) to -vo x11.
>
> I made a dirty hack in a shell script: It just checks the
> CPU time that the mplayer call took. If it was less than
> one second, it assumes that -vo xv failed and retries with
> -vo sdl. Yep, this is incredibly ugly, but worked so far.
Very clever. I'm going to steal that idea.
> Actually we should submit a problem report to the author of
> mplayer to get this fixed. I don't think it would be very
> difficult for him to fix it.
I'll do so in a few minutes.
> There's another bug: When you pause playback, the CPU
> usage goes to 100% for no apparent reason. There must be
> some busy-waiting loop in the code. I notice that because
> the noisy fan of my notebook starts spinning when I pause
> playback, which is annoying. It never spins during normal
> playback.
This does *not* happen for me. I run xosview all the time, and it shows no
such no effect nor does my fan pop on. It *does* go 100% for slightly less
than a second upon resuming from suspend, but no problems during the suspend
itself or normal playback, and the brief spike upon resume doesn't seem
unreasonable. I have mplayer 0.50, FWIW. Downloaded just a couple of weeks
ago. You might want to try updating yours.
>
> Regards
> Oliver
--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
-------> Free Dmitry Sklyarov! (let him go home) <-----------
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?084944343030a12FE5>