mplayer question.

[Andy Green]

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On Saturday 26 June 2004 09:42, HaJo Schatz wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 15:57, François Patte wrote:

> > > whenever I try to
> > > watch a movie file with mplayer I get an error message "Error
> > > opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device"
> > > I don't know what this means.
>
> The video_out device is the driver mplayer uses to display the video on
> the X screen. Try "mplayer -vo help" for a list of drivers available in
> mplayer. Then try e.g. "mplayer -vo xv movie.avi" to use the xv driver.
> Once you found you best working driver, you can put it as option into
> the ~/.mplayer/config file.

As HaJo says, xv is the best mplayer output method, this uses the video card 
hardware to size and display the video frames without involving the CPU.  
However not all video drivers support xv, for example if you were using the 
vesa X video driver this does not provide xv support.

If you run mplayer with -vo x11 this uses only normal software drawing for the 
video frames, it is CPU intensive and only allows 1:1 display of the video, 
but it should get you "up and limping".

Check to see if Xv is supported on your hardware/driver with

xvinfo

Check to see what video driver you are using by looking in /etc/X11/xorg.conf 
(FC2) or /etc/X11/XF86Config (FC1) for your videocard Device stanza's Driver 
line.  If it is vesa, depending on your video card you can probably do a lot 
better.

- -Andy

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