Experimental mplayer packages available: current code, VDPAU and VAAPI acceleration, multi-threading

[Adam Williamson]

I thought this may be of interest to the list, so I'm sharing. :)

I've built some experimental mplayer packages for Fedora 11 and Rawhide
(x86-32 and x86-64 arches) with shiny new features. Aside from being
very recent snapshots, one of them includes support for hardware video
playback acceleration via VDPAU and VAAPI, and the other includes
support for multi-threaded playback (so you can split the decoding load
across multiple cores).

The playback acceleration can definitely be used on NVIDIA adapters
(from the GeForce 8xxx series onwards) using the proprietary driver
(not, unfortunately, nouveau). Also on Intel Poulsbo (GMA 500) adapters,
using my packaged version of the native driver for that chipset (link is
in the blog post). VDPAU acceleration is also allegedly possible on S3
Chrome 530 GT and S3 Chrome 540 GTX adapters using S3’s own driver, but
I haven't had the chance to test that.

Multi-threaded playback can be done on any system, but only really makes
sense on those with multiple processors (cores).

Full details of where, how and why are in my blog post:
http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/09/03/mplayer-va-api-vdpau-ffmpeg-mt-experimental-build-repository-for-fedora-11-rawhide/ . 

Please do let me know how your experience goes!

Thanks to Dominik, Nicolas and their predecessors for the main mplayer
spec, on which these builds are based. Please let me know if you're
interested in this work, guys. For now, I'm keeping the necessary
support packages - libva, libvdpau, vdpau-video - in the repository
along with the mplayer builds. I have libva up for review in the main
Fedora repos at the moment, and I know libvdpau is hung up in review
hell while the powers that be decide whether it can go into Fedora or
not. Once that gets into a repository, we could certainly build the main
mplayer package with VDPAU support at least, since that was merged into
mainline mplayer months ago. Once libva gets in, we could build with
VAAPI support (though I suppose we might want to wait until upstream
accepts the patch). The multi-threading stuff is still fairly
experimental, though, I believe.

-- 
adamw