iBook and playing DVDs

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@iname.com>]

	Well, I'm not having luck getting my iBook 600MHz playing DVDs
	in a decent way.

	In fact, I've spent a great amount of time trying to
	understand what the problems are, playing with many different
	programs and getting unsatisfactory results.

	I have woody installed in this iBook and, with xine (0.9.8), I
	get a reasonable playback, with around 15% of dropped frames
	and with ugly interlaced frames. Enabling the onefield_xv
	deinterlace method works and makes the DVD more or less
	watchable, though during some stages, I can see artifacts on
	the image due to excessive frames being dropped.

	I can't get vlc 0.3.0 working well here, because there are
	issues with the sound (probably due to endianness problems,
	although I'm not really sure). I already tried telling vlc all
	different possibilities for endianness or signedness of the
	output, but I don't know if the menu is functional, as I saw
	little changes when I played with that option. Enabling the
	diagnostics seems to suggest that not all frames are played.

	I also tried getting mplayer to work with the iBook. It works
	moderately well, but had endianess problems with the audio
	(and in other parts of the program too -- I even sent them one
	patch to correct the generation of WAV files).

	Mplayer can now play vob files with decent sound, and the
	video is smooth (if I compile with gcc 3.0), but it seems that
	the iBook can't keep up with the decoding of video frames and
	the audio and the video become desynchronized. :-(

	If I playback with an option to drop frames, then it is
	watchable, but the interlaced frames become noticeable. I can
	use the option "-npp lb" to deinterlace and it works, but it
	is not usable, as too many frames get dropped (even though I'd
	guess that more frames would be dropped).

	The output of mplayer shows the amount of time it spends
	decoding the frames, showing the frames and dealing with
	audio. I notice that the percentage of time it spends with
	video output is quite high in comparison to my Celeron 466MHz
	(I'll make further tests).

	I tried installing Michel's XFree 4.2.0 binaries and they seem
	to make xine work better, dropping around 6 frames less than
	with woody's X 4.1.0.1.

	On the other hand, DRI (which, I heard, is supposed to enable
	DMA transfers to video) wasn't enabled with XFree 4.2.0
	because it complained that my r128 module is version 2.1.6,
	but that version 2.2 would be needed.

	The catch is that current benh's kernel (just rsync'ed) still
	has r128.c with version 2.1.6. Is there any way for me to get
	DMA working with this machine?

	I have already tried many things that I could think of, but I
	am starting to think that the possibilities are almost
	exhausted.  :-(

	So, is there anybody here that is able to see DVDs with their
	iBook?


	Thanks for ANY help or comment, Roger...


P.S.: BTW an mplayer compiled with X 4.1 headers uses 40% of its time
in video output. The same binary, with X 4.2, uses around 140% and is
quite (visually) slower than with before. Does this increase in time
come from the headers with which the program was compiled?
-- 
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  Rogério Brito - rbrito@iname.com - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/
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