Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 03:07:20 +0100 (CET) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: recommendations for mpg avi viewer requested Message-ID: <200201070207.g0727KS26648@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <0b6763058220612FE4@mail4.nc.rr.com>
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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. 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. > 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. 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. 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. Regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. "All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream" (E. A. Poe) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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