Nick Rout wrote:
this is a flame war in the making, essentially xine versus mplayer (as it seems totem is a wrapper for xine)
i find mplayer gives better quality, plays more codecs and generally "just goes". it will play weird video files that my media player in windows barfs at. I can play 6 or more video files windowed on my desktop at the same time. (if i want to)
OTOH xine has better handling of dvd menus
Yes, a flame war is certainly possible when discussing preferencial movie player, however I will comment based on hardware specifics.
For me, mplayer is far more stable (especially since I installed Mandrake 9.2), but xine plays with vastly better video quality and menu handling (if it can run without segfaulting!).
On the quality issue, the reason that mplayer looks rough on my hardware is that the mplayer devs have excluded hooks in their video codecs to use hardware accelerated calls on nvidia cards, whereas the xine devs have used these hardware accelerated hooks into nvidia cards...the result is that scaled 1600x1200 res DVD playback on my GeForceFX 5600 looks breathtaking with xine, but has rough colour banding and lots of grain with mplayer.
If you have an nVidia card and xine can run reliably on your system I'd opt for that, since mplayer may not look as good on that brand of gfx card. I also cannot use many menus in many of my DVD collection with mplayer. If xine however is not cooperative, or you have an ATI or other graphics card mplayer might be your best shot...
-- Kind regards,
Chris Wilkinson, Christchurch, New Zealand.
