Re: video card

[Alan Young <ayoung@teleport.com>]

On 31 Mar 2003 01:57:42 +0200 Falk Hueffner <falk.hueffner@student.uni-tuebingen.de>
wrote:

> Richard Fillion <rick@rhix.ods.org> writes:
> 
> > It seems i've partially fixed my problems with slow video output.  I
> > built XF4.3 and installed it.  Now it takes forever to get into X,
> > but if it makes it better, i'm all for it.  I can play mpegs rather
> > well, only dropping a few frames here and there.  I have 'mplayer'
> > aliased to 'mplayer -framedrop -vo sdl -cache 65536 '.  Yes, 64megs
> > of cache, hey i have 512megs of RAM, may aswell put it to use.  Divx
> > at original size is decent, almost watchable, but fullscreen it
> > starts dropping frames like crazy.

I'm confused by "Now it takes forever to get into X".  What do you
mean by this?  What did you use compiler switches did you use for the
DefaultGcc2AxpOpt variable in the server's host.def file?

> That indicates you're not using the Xv extension. Xv moves
> YUV-conversion and scaling to the hardware, which saves a lot of CPU
> time. Try xvinfo to see whether your card and driver support it, or
> mplayer -vo xv.

In addition to Falk's suggestion, a couple of other things to try
with mplayer are turning double buffering and/or direct rendering
on or off.  Sometimes they help, sometimes they do not.
To turn on double buffering in the X server, your XF86Config file needs
to have a 'Load "dbe"' line in the Module section.  After restarting
the server, try starting mplayer with the -double switch.  Direct
rendering (which may or may not work) is turned on in mplayer with
the -dr switch.

One other thought, if your running with a color depth of 32, try
reducing it to 24 or 16 bpp.  Then there's less color data that
needs to be processed.

Alan