Chris Wilkinson wrote: > Hi there, > 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...
You might want to check out the latest versions of mplayer 1.0pre3 I think plf has an uptodate version as the Mplayer developers managed to get their vidix drivers to work for nvidia. It's changed quite abit since version 0.91 which is what came with mandrake 9.2. I've never noticed any image quality difference between xine and Mplayer. I have them both using the xv driver which makes use of hardware acceleration on nvidia cards if you have the offical nvidia drivers installed also recently been using the vidix driver which is also nice and fast. But then I don't run DVD's lacking a dvd drive just divx, Quicktime and various other formats. As for speed difference, with a 450Mhz K6-2 I really notice small differences in speed especially on the more highly compressed formats like divX and xvid. The other difference is I compile Mplayer specificly for my machine (-mmmx -m3dnow -march=k6-2) which is what gives it the speed boost. Chad
