Some references from other projects

[Jeffrey W. Baker]

Hello,

I've recently taken an interest in working on vlc.  I downloaded it and I
truly like it a lot!  It is the only DVD player for Linux which has a
normal interface (not themes, skins, and such), can decrypt CSS without
hassle, can switch between languages smoothly, and can even seek and
adjust the speed correctly.  Truly, I am impressed by your work.

My main interest is to update the ALSA output plugin to the latest ALSA
API, which may be released at some point in my lifetime.  If anyone else
is working on this, I would like to coordinate.

I have been tracking some other projects, and I will share my impressions.
Xine is not as capable as vlc, and it has a very poor user interface.
Xine does synchronize audio and video well, and it uses very little CPU
time.  Xine CVS has not compiled since the beginning of March.  OMS has
never compiled nor run successfully on my machines, both x86 and PPC.  I
believe that the LiViD project suffers from a lack of developer maturity.

Finally, I got email from a man at a US naval research facility who is
decoding 1080i HDTV streams on a 400 MHz Motorola 7410 (G4), without
hardware colorspace conversion.  This convinces me that with clever use of
SIMD, vlc and other MPEG players can begin to use very little CPU power.
If I have a very large amount of spare time, I may try to fix vlc's
AltiVec iDCT code.  I have a 7410 machine for testing.

Regards,
Jeffrey