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Bluey_the_dog
n00b
Joined: 13 Oct 2002
Posts: 54
Location: Perth, Australia
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 Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 7:29 am Post subject: Best graphics subsystem to run MPlayer |
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Hi all,
I have a small Via SP13000 box that I want to set up as a media unit. I've decided that I'm going to use MPlayer as the player software but now I need to work out what graphics subsystem, by _subsystem_ I mean X, directFB, svgalib and the like, I'm going to use. As this machine will only be playing either music or videos, it would appear to me that X is a bit of overkill and that directFB or something along that line would be more appropriate.
Does anyone have any past experience on this topic that they may wish to share?
Regards,
Andrew
p.s. It being a small low powered Via board, if I can get out of this without having to compile X it would be good. |
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yngwin
Retired Dev
Joined: 19 Dec 2002
Posts: 4572
Location: Suzhou, China
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 11:50 am Post subject: |
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MPlayer performance is best in X using the xv video output.
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i92guboj
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 10315
Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 1:26 pm Post subject: Re: Best graphics subsystem to run MPlayer |
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| Bluey_the_dog wrote: | Hi all,
I have a small Via SP13000 box that I want to set up as a media unit. I've decided that I'm going to use MPlayer as the player software but now I need to work out what graphics subsystem, by _subsystem_ I mean X, directFB, svgalib and the like, I'm going to use. As this machine will only be playing either music or videos, it would appear to me that X is a bit of overkill and that directFB or something along that line would be more appropriate.
Does anyone have any past experience on this topic that they may wish to share?
Regards,
Andrew
p.s. It being a small low powered Via board, if I can get out of this without having to compile X it would be good. |
It depends on what resource you value the most, and where the bottleneck will be.
If you use xv and you have the possibility to use accelerated drivers then your cpu usage will be lower, though of course X will consume some ram. On the contrary, on framebuffer you are going to have much less ram used, but everything is going to be done by the cpu, not your graphics card. If you have to choose between directfb and svgalib, I'd suggest to stay with directfb unless you have a good reason to take the other choice.
EDIT: As yngwin already said, performance wise, it's better to use X. However, it all depends on your hardware, if your hardware can play videos ok at the given resolution and it's not going to do any other task, then it's doesn't really matter. |
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fangorn
Veteran
Joined: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1886
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 1:49 pm Post subject: |
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If you wanna play Video with a VIA Epia you will most likely want to use X and XVMC, because it will leave you 70% of CPU power to do other tasks. If you get it to work that is. 
I tried getting it to work for some weekends some time (years) ago and then decided that it was not that necessary after all to play video with the machine. 
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beandog
Bodhisattva
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 2072
Location: /usa/utah
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| Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 5:22 am Post subject: |
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Youre going to have the best options and support with X, by far. You just can't do as much with fb outputs, and it's really not worth the hassle (in my opinion).
I've got a small VIA as well and I'm using openchrome + X and it chugs away just fine, playing anything I can throw at it.
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DooBeDooBeDo
Apprentice
Joined: 21 Aug 2002
Posts: 220
Location: UK
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| Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:47 pm Post subject: |
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I have an SP1300 too, and I agree use X.
You may be better off with xine rather than mplayer. Xine has XvMC VLD (hardware mpeg2) out of the box, whereas you'll need to hunt down a patch for a recent mplayer. Although mplayer has marginally better avi performance.
Mine will play 720p Mpeg2 quite happily (10-20% CPU) using 'xine -V xxmc', use '-V xv' for everything else. | Code: | top
Tasks: 71 total, 1 running, 70 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 15.2%us, 5.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 77.9%id, 1.3%wa, 0.7%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 970160k total, 949224k used, 20936k free, 100k buffers
Swap: 506036k total, 148k used, 505888k free, 662820k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
12808 mythtv 20 0 614m 116m 98m S 14.5 12.3 0:27.04 xine
5774 mythtv 20 0 208m 36m 13m S 3.6 3.8 60:31.35 mythbackend
5891 mythtv 20 0 5392 3088 2420 S 2.6 0.3 0:25.90 fluxbox
5666 mysql 20 0 143m 42m 4100 S 0.7 4.5 32:46.36 mysqld
5860 root 20 0 237m 32m 3288 S 0.7 3.4 6:45.06 X
ps aux|grep xine
mythtv 12808 16.0 17.1 563996 166248 ? Sl 22:39 0:41 xine -f -V xxmc /videos/dad/big_buck_bunny_720p_surround.mpg
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