[ILUG] Playing DVDs with MPlayer

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Ronny B wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 09:00:37PM +0000, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> > The theories expressed to me by several people were poor sound card support.
> > This (if I've understood correctly) can be very wasteful of your PCI
> > bandwidth.  I personally am using an Aureal Vortex 1 sound card, the support
> > for which was somewhat hacked together after the company went bust without
> > giving any info about the card.  I have to find a soundblaster or similar
> > well supported card to see if it helps.  Anyway, I havn't done that yet.
> I was not able to play DVDs until I upgraded from a K6-2 450 to a Duron 750.
> In tests (MP3 & other encoding, just running resource hogs like *anything* in
> win98), this CPU is about two to three times as fast.
> 
> When playing DVD, my CPU usage rarely goes beyond 30%, typically staying around
> 25%. I had an NVidia GeForce2 MX and an SB Live! on both configurations, so I
> would say that P2 of yours should be capable of playing DVDs with MPlayer.

I have played DVDs in win98 with hw decoder so I know the machine can do
it.  I've seen guys on who were involved early on talk about playing DVDs
on the likes of 300MHz Celerons so mine (not to mention Roger's the Athlon
1400).  Naturally this needs linux to equate with all the linux components
(hw & sw) in terms of performance though.  Having looked, it appears that
my sound card has ceased development (and I can't blame them to be honest),
so I'm looking at testing with a SB Live, before going out and buying one.
When I get round to it I'll let you know how it goes.

> I agree with people who say it's a matter of support - but it's also worth
> getting the CVS version of MPlayer.

Oh, FWIW I use a mplayer debian package from:

http://marillat.free.fr/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/

Gavin