ttuuxxx wrote:The packages were compiled as i386 so no hardware acceleration. But compiled at that speed It doesn't need it.
The term "hardware acceleration" is often misunderstood. Hardware acceleration, as it applies to media playback, is most importantly
graphics hardware acceleration. With the appropriate "XVideo" output method a media player application should be able to take advantage of the graphics device's processing to handle colour space conversion and scaling, thus relieving the CPU of these tasks. The benefits in terms of CPU usage are slight, only 5-10% reduction, but image quality is far better and fullscreen works better.
With "XvMC" output method, the hardware acceleration concept is take one step further by actually decoding the MPEG2 codec ... but that's another story.
I'm pleased to report that this VLC version does include "XVideo" output, refer attached image, so graphics hardware acceleration is certainly available, and automatically in use when possible.
clickelliott wrote:I'm using 4.0 on a Celeron 2.something Ghz with 640mb 266ram, 256mb nvidia.
ttuuxxx wrote:a great report on an older pc
"older"? No wonder so few people understand hardware acceleration: they don't have hardware old enough to see the difference!
Let's get "older" into perspective: the official minimum specification for DVD playback is Pentium2 with 16MB AGP graphics card which supports Xvideo overlay.
I have a Pentium2-350 with (more recent) 256MB nVIDIA graphics card which is close to this specification, and ideal to test media player applications.
When I boot the Puppy4 CD and install this version of VLC my CPU usage while playing a DVD is 68%.
Under the MPlayer gui (GMPlayer) and using "xv" output my CPU usage is 81%.
When I launch MPlayer from the commandline my CPU usage is 70%.
Gxine is 77%.
ttuuxxx wrote:Plus it (VLC) takes less resources.
According to the above results, only by a small margin. On anything from Pentium3 up this margin will be unnoticeable.
ttuuxxx wrote:Well The dvd image quality is better <snip> It plays better image quality
Not on my system with nVIDIA and MPlayer using xv output. As good? Maybe, but no better.
Picture quality differences will more likely be due to video output configuration: xv versus x11.
ttuuxxx wrote:Plus its smaller.
This VLC package is 9.5MB total, thanks largely to wxWidgets.
My MPlayer-1.0rc2 package (with inbuilt ffmpeg) is 5.0MB.
The 2 MPlayer packages which bind to Puppy4's external ffmpeg; the official dotpet and the one by plinej, are both about 2MB.
ttuuxxx wrote:The DvD search is faster
Possibly.
Newcrest wrote:is there any advantage over Mplayer/Smplayer?
VLC's claim to fame is good DVD menu support.
VLC seems to engender loyalty amongst its longterm users. That's fine. I just wanted to get some facts straight.