On Wednesday 03 December 2003 10:58, MJ Ray wrote:
I'm sure that I've seen machines without special video hardware doing DVD decoding, but presumably these things can help somehow. I think the full-screen playback is controlled by some X extensions, so you'll need something with a driver that supports them (Is that RENDER or DRI?). Maybe someone with more experience of DVDs can wade in here: anyone built a custom DVD player?
My 1Ghz Athlon can do fullscreen dvd decoding without any DVD specific hardware, I think I was using Xv, but I've just discovered the hard way that xine's start up options are persistent, so I am not sure now.
Anyway Xv seems to work well, sdl worked too but not in fullscreen. Whether any of these are dependant on DRI, I don't know.
My trusty PIII 500 at a previous job could do it too although that, unlike the Athlon here was unable to do anything else at the same time. This machine remains surprisingly responsive.
I used to use a Hollywood card in preference to a Graphics card with a TV out simply because at the time I hadn't found a card with a good enough Composite output (a lot of them are a bit ropey) But for any reasonably powerfull machine I would say that DVD playback hardware/accelerators are not a requirement. Unless you insist on doing it with Windows XP and the useless crop of Software DVD playback utilities available for Win32.
(I find it ironic that my 1Ghz Linux Desktop can play back a DVD and have a remote VNC session open surfing the web, checking email etc, yet my 2Ghz Windows Laptop cannot playback a DVD without stuttering.)