Thread: mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.21
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ArnimS is offline ArnimS
2008-01-02 , 01:47
Posts: 1,107 | Thanked: 720 times | Joined on Mar 2007 @ Germany
#77
Originally Posted by Maceo View Post
- When the OS shows a pop-up system message while a movie is playing, e.g. when the battery is low or it needs to signal that it has lost the WLAN connection, this garbles the video for as long as the system message is being displayed (most of the screen goes black, and a small false-coloured still picture of the last video image is shown in the top left corner of the screen). This happens both in full-screen and windowed mode. This is quite distracting. Quick fix: suppress system messages during playback (suboptimal, since you might not notice you're running the battery down) Compromise, if that's even feasible in Maemo: Suppress the original system messages, but replicate them in Mplayer's OSD overlay style (still suboptimal, since inconsistent with standard system behaviour). Best: let system popups overlay regular video output, even if that drops frames.
Mplayer is heavily hacked to provide optimal performance. One of those hacks (xsp pixel doubling) means that other apps must not display or things will get garbled. Disabling this hack means mplayer would get something like 4-6 times worse performance so 'let system popups overlay regular video output' is not an option.

One possible change, afaik, would be for mplayer to register its window as 'completely on top of everything' to the X server, so that status messages won't overdraw it. Although, come to think of it, if it hasn't been implemented yet there might be some reason why it can't work.

Serge's Mplayer delivers performance many times faster than a 'standard' media player port. Performance-wise, it is likely the most optimized application ever released for the tablets, and we all owe him huge thanks (if that link doesn't work, here's here's the thread ) for his countless hours of work on it.

You give a good description of issues relating to mplayer - again, most are related to the accelerated playback hacks, and thus are not 'problems to be solved' by mplayer but rather issues related to the underlying OS (issues that will likely be addressed in future tablets). Feel free to stop by the Mplayer project page to leave your comments and feedback.