[mythtv-users] MythVideo internal player vs mplayer / xine

[Rich West]

> Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com> wrote:
>
>     With my current install of MythTV, we pull all of our DVD's off of a
>     central NFS server as ISO images and play them via MythVideo's
>     internal
>     player.
>
>     There's some nice features of MythVideo's internal player, such as the
>     ability to be "stretched" to fill the screen and its nice
>     integration in
>     to the rest of MythTV.
>
>     However, since it has been installed (November '06), I've always
>     noticed
>     that there is periodic hesitation and hiccups in the playback. There
>     are a number of complaints like this in the archive as well, and a
>     number of responses suggested using mplayer (since it seems to
>     pre-buffer content) instead of the internal player.
>
>     Is this indeed the case? 98% of the DVD's we have on the home server
>     are just the movie itself (no menus or extras), so we really just need
>     the ability to pause, play, fast forward, reverse, skip forward/back
>     chapters, and fill the screen. I'm just looking to smooth out the
>     playback, really..
>
>     The article at ExtremeTech
>     (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2055340,00.asp) got me
>     thinking about using mplayer over the internal player.. :)
>
>     -Rich
>
James Warden wrote:
> Hi Rich,
>
> I use xine for DVDs with the following options :
> xine --no-splash -V xxmc --autoscan dvd -pfhq
>
> --no-splash : you guessed it
> -V xxmc : uses the XvMC extended video ouput driver
> --autoscan will scan the DVD at startup
> -pfhq means start playing at full screen, GUI hidden and quit at end 
> of playing
>
> I like xine for DVD playback. The 'a' key switches display formats 
> (auto, square, 16:9, etc) very easily (faster than mythtv), the 'z' 
> key zooms in the display (convenient when watching liveTV recordings 
> to eliminate some jitter on the  bottom edge of the picture ('Z' zooms 
> out).
>
> Most of all, I never experience DVD playback hickups with xine. And 
> all on-the-fly display format changes are smooth, no playback hickup 
> either. Furthermore, with a right button click on the display, you get 
> a menu where you can switch subtitles (language, on/off, etc), apply 
> some video postprocessing on the fly,  and whatnot.
>
> CPU usage is small as well :)
>
> But of course, if you have stored DVD content on some NFS shares, then 
> you will have to start xine slightly differently ... try 'man xine' ;)

Thanks.. I think I will try that out this evening.  One key element that 
I left off is that none of my FE's have keyboards or mice, so whatever I 
move too has to be remote-friendly.  :)  I have some xine and mplayer 
keymappings in my lircrc.. I'll have to experiment with them.

Thanks again!
-Rich