[MPlayer-users] "What card do you suggest me to buy?"

[Toth Csaba]

Hi!

I'm a Matrox G200 owner and am playing movies on framebuffer console with
mga_vid. I'm planning to purchase an ATI Radeon 7500. I wonder if it is a
good idea compared to G200 or should I buy a Matrox G400. My first goal is
to find a solution, which has good video quality, fast (it is as hardware
accelerated as possible, _and_ it has as low CPU pressure as possible), and
has as many features (gamma correction, brightness, ...) as possible. In
advance: I'll not game with my configuration (I develop softwares besides
the movie playing), so don't say me Geforce.

My first problem is a small table presented in FAQ.html, at "Q: What card do
you suggest me to buy?" The table says that ATI cards has scaling filters and
adaptive deinterlace hardware acceleration with mplayer. Is this a big
advantage?

I've read more about ATI support with mplayer, but I'm a bit confused.
There is a driver called "vidix" maintained by Nick Kurshev. I thought,
that this is the actual pair of the mga_vid for Matrox. But this is not
the case.

I'll number my questions.

As I could understand, the vidix driver for ATI can be used in two basic
scenarios. First, you can use it on console, but you should use VESA driver
than. Documenattaion examples:

"mplayer -vo vesa:vidix:radeon_vid.so -fs -zoom -double -bpp 32 file.avi
...
mplayer -vo vesa:vidix -brightness -300 -contrast 200 filename.avi"

Hurray! But the VESA docs says:

"What are minuses:
...
- It's the slowest driver from all the available ones for MPlayer.
(But only if your card doesn't support DGA mode - otherwise this driver is
comparable by speed with -vo dga and -vo fbdev ones.
...
- It doesn't use any hardware accelerations (like YUV overlay or hw
scaling)."

1. So. Is fast or is it not? Has the VESA driver for ATI DGA like hardware
acceleration (on console?)? Is it as fast (if it has DGA acceleration) as
framebuffer drivers?

Probably Nick Kurshev who writes this in other place of the docs:

"VESA drivers don't use any hardware acceleration but it simulates DGA
through 64K window, which is configured through 32-bit mode functions of
BIOS. ATI cards have enough fast video memory (DIMM or DDR chips with 64 -
128-bit access) so it's not bottleneck for them."

2. This seems like an ugly hack. If this is true, than ATI VESA+VIDIX has
not hardware acceleration, and it is slow (correct me if not).

Can I use DGA acceleration on console (out of X)? The use of DGA is important
in other aspects. Double buffering can only be turned on with DGA.
Documentation says that this will slow down things a bit. This sound weird.

The second scenario is:
"You can use standalone video output driver: -vo xvidix
This driver was developed as X11's front end to VIDIX technology. It
requires XServer and can work only under XServer."

3. Ok, I can guess that this method can take advantage of DGA, and has full
hardware acceleration. Am I right?

4. What if I want to output the movie to TV. What is the better solution?

Now. Let's suppose that I buy a 7500 Radeon. As I can see (correct me if not)
the VIDIX stuff and the ATI driver is currently maintained by "enthusiasts".
If he stops the support, than I won't be able to use my configuration as good
as before. This is also true for mga_vid, but I hope that Arpi will support
Matroxes. What are the main goals for the future (2-3 years)?

Comments on all this blurb is wellcome. What are the experiences of ATI
users.

Bye!

--

tocsa

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| email:     tocsa at inf.bme.hu                   |
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