Sound
Grand Master Lee
What sound drivers do you use ? Presently i believe only mandrake offers alsa at install. Compile the alsa modules, sound performance is worth it.
As well, this is not me flaming Mplayer, wich is a delicious app, but should be considered a SWISS ARMY knife. I mean, i belive in more specialised apps for particular tasks:
Ex :
For DVD playback OGLE :
Ogle is still devel, but has the best libcss ( decryption of Contents Scrambling System, the weak encrypting of the dvd data ). I have been able to pay DVD that even winDVD or other win apps could not play/decrypt. As well, it has BY FAR the best menu/mouse navigation of all. Few problems, no rewind, only fast forward, chapters work tho. I am using ogle 0.8.5.
Here is a sample ogle log of a dvd playback, using alsa 0.9rc8 and ogle:
Note[ogle_vout]: Display w: 356, h: 267, hp: 1400, vp: 1050
Note[ogle_vout]: Display sar: 373800/373800 = 1.000000
Note[ogle_vout]: Found Xv extension 2.2, checking for suitable adaptors
Note[ogle_vout]: Xv adaptor "ATI Radeon Video Overlay" port 69 image format 842094169
Debug[ogle_vout]: resize: 768, 576
decode: B-frame before forward ref frame
Debug[ogle_audio]: decode_a52: found sync
Note[ogle_audio]: Using audio driver 'oss'
Debug[ogle_audio]: encoding 1, resolution 16, byte order 1, rate 48000
Debug[ogle_audio]: fragments 16, size 4096
Debug[ogle_audio]: 1680873637.+407952808 s off, resyncing
Note[ogle_audio]: delay resolution: 0.010874826, 522 samples, rate: 48000
Debug[ogle_vout]: wm_name: Openbox
Debug[ogle_vout]: resize: 1400, 1050
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
display: frame rate: 25.000 fps
As you can see it is perfect, no jump what so ever. I have compiled the ac3passthrough app founds in the latest alsa-tools tar ball, i play heavy ones as Star Wars II Attack of the Clones with a 18/25 % processor usage.
For Divx and WMP, WMA files, i use aviplay, form the latest avifile library. Program is invoked by 'aviplay' command, and requires qt.
http://avifile.sourceforge.net/
In my own experience this is for me the most performing divx, avi, mpeg and whatever plugins/libs you add.
Xine is as well a good overall project, but with the added price/weight of a few gnome libs, i have found Totem ( the Gnome Xine library video player ) to be much more reliable.
http://xinehq.de/http://www.hadess.net/totem.php3
VLC, or Video Lan Client and Video Lan Server is an excellent project and player, reads DVD and mpeg by default. Very good video stream solution too.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
At last, when none of those play the file, i use mplayer. Especially for quicktime, but lets face it, i hate proprietary format and have only a few .mov or realplayers videos ( Southpark RoXs ).
Hope that clarifies things.
