ATI and Linux compatibility

[WildcatWhiz]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but it ended on a topic I'm interested in...

Is anyone having an luck playing HD video using fglrx? You know, are the massive tearing issues going away? They aren't for me at least...

Or better, if they aren't, anyone know of a video player for linux that uses multiple threads?

[Jimbo]

Run this ruby script.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'fileutils'

FFmpegRepo = 'git://gitorious.org/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-mt.git'
FFmpegDirectory = 'ffmpeg-mt'
MPlayerRepo = 'svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk'
MPlayerDirectory = 'mplayer'

puts "** installing dependencies **"
system "sudo apt-get update"
system "sudo apt-get install smplayer"
system "sudo apt-get build-dep mplayer"

puts "** Downloading FFmpeg-mt **"
system "git clone #{FFmpegRepo} #{FFmpegDirectory}"
FileUtils.cd FFmpegDirectory, :verbose => true do
end

puts "** Downloading MPlayer **"
system "svn checkout #{MPlayerRepo} #{MPlayerDirectory}"
FileUtils.cd MPlayerDirectory, :verbose => true do
system "svn revert -R *"
end

puts "** Copying ffmpeg-mt into mplayer **"
Dir[ File.join(FFmpegDirectory, 'libav*') ].each do |libav_dir|
libav_dir = libav_dir.split(File::Separator).last
FileUtils.rm_rf File.join(MPlayerDirectory, libav_dir), :verbose => true
FileUtils.cp_r File.join(FFmpegDirectory, libav_dir),
File.join(MPlayerDirectory, libav_dir), :verbose => true
end

puts "** Applying the patch **"
FileUtils.copy('ffmpeg-mt/mt-work/mplayer.diff','mplayer')
FileUtils.cd MPlayerDirectory, :verbose => true do
system 'patch -up0 -i mplayer.diff'
end

puts "** Building MPlayer **"
FileUtils.cd MPlayerDirectory, :verbose => true do
system './configure --disable-live --disable-mencoder'
system 'make -j2'
end

Open smplayer, and configure it to:

- use the mplayer binary created by the script
- opengl video output
- use 2 or more threads (depending on your number of cpu)

Enjoy mplayer-mt, is a nice piece of software.

[WildcatWhiz]

Wow, that looks great. So this is using Mplayer with multiple cores?

What about using xvba? Doesn't ATI support xvba/vaapi in mplayer? Anybody know how to use that? I've got this killer card and I'm doing all of my video processing on the CPU. What a waste! Grrr....

[Jimbo]

Yes this is for multiple cores on mplayer.

For xvba there is another thread, and I think kano has some script. HD4000 supports xvba, but HD5000 doesn't (yet).

A modern CPU can handle all type of HD content using mplayer-mt, the only weak point is that it will use cpu power and cpu power consumption, around 20W (well, it really depends on the type of HD content and the type of your CPU). So, if you don't suffer from an high placebo symptom for using video hardware acceleration, you can use mplayer-mt just fine.