[ANN] vlc 0.2.81

[PhiloVivero]

Samuel Hocevar wrote:

> > THis certainly has improvements: I can now view dvd using -V x11.
> > However -V sdl and -V xvideo still shows plain blue windows.
>
>    Looks like a problem with your xvideo installation ; however I have
> no idea what could be going wrong. Maybe someone with the same video
> card will have more information.

What does it mean if SDL works, but xvideo doesn't work?

And, playing a DVD still trashes the filesystem cache (ie: eats up all RAM).
I tried binding /dev/dvd to a raw device, but selecting the raw device via VLC
does nothing. VLC perhaps thinks it's not a DVD device and thus ignores my
attempts to play it?

Raw device documentation claims that you have to speak with a raw device using
full-sector addressing, so maybe this is the problem?

I'm keen to find out what systems people are using that give flawless playback
of DVDs, because I still have these problems:

0. After RAM gets filled up, the video gets choppy, sometimes pausing up to
three seconds while the filesystem thrashes. So far as I can tell, this is
only because the filesystem buffer is full, not any bug in VLC.

1. Although video is fine (until RAM runs out) and sound is fine, they're
almost never in sync. Off by 1/4 to 1/2 second. Watching dialogue is painful.
And it's always speeding up/slowing down because music is off-tune and pretty
bad.

2. Can't use xvideo, whatever it is ;) -- SDL works and is pretty fast, but
someone on the list said xvideo gives him good playback, so I thought I'd try.

3. Not VLC, but ESD, using ESD sounds horrible. I still have to kill ESD and
let VLC do the 48kHz-->44kHz downsampling. Do PC sound cards not do 48kHz? And
VLC's downsampling isn't perfect, either. Is there some solution to get great
sound, short of cracking a book on DSP?

Is anyone interested telling me starting points to figure out any of these
problems in more detail?

And, just an aside, what's the story for supporting DXR/3 or Hollywood video
hardware? The website mentions support is forthcoming. Is it a scheduled
project?

Oh, and VLC is a great project. It's great that there is so much work being
done on this. Having the possibility of watching DVDs under Linux at all is
sure nice.

--
PhiloVivero