beneboy wrote:
Is DMA switched on for the DVD drive? Thats my only suggestion I'm afraid (apart from suggesting that you should play with the ati driver some
more).
I wasn't sure how to check this, but thanks for the reply!
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
The vesa drivers represent the lowest common denominator of graphics card features over a standard command set. This is why they work with most modern cards. However they give very poor performance, no 2D acceleration, no 3D acceleration, no access to texture memory etc... and quite possibly no access to whatever video overlay mode xv needs.
I think you should concentrate your efforts on getting the correct drivers for your Ati card working. AFAIK the X11 output does a software render to a window box, poor quality and resource consuming. the overlay modes I think xv uses open a video window and then pipe a raster image stream over to the card.
Yup, this solved it. I kept hacking at it but couldn't get the ati driver to work single handedly so I stuck Knoppix 3.3 in my CD-ROM drive and let it write an XF86Config-4 file for me! I then copied the relevent section to my debian config:
Section "Device" Option "sw_cursor" Identifier "Video Card" Driver "ati" VendorName "All" BoardName "All" EndSection
It also detected some better settings for my monitor which was handy. I now have lovely smooth DVD playback using the xv output in mplayer, thank you.
As an aside, what are the issues surrounding the licensing on mplayer and is this the reason that a more recent version is not in Debian's package list? Someone in #alug (sorry I can't remember who it was, may have been thom) said that mplayer had licensing issues because of some proprietary software being bundled with it.
People on freenode in #mplayer claim mplayer is fully compliant with the GPL and any proprietary codecs do not come bundled with it and are optional extras available for download. They do, however seem to show some hostility to the Debian community, although I may have imagined it!
Shame really as I've found mplayer a fantastic piece of software.