[vlc] When do we see working OpenGL in recent OS X VLC builds?

[Galen]

I'm on a 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook (not far from the current fastest 
PowerBooks or even G4s) and the latest 10.3 build and I have 
desperately wanted to watch 720p and 1080i HDTV streams raw, but 
everything online said you need a dual G5 - and this seems to be true 
based on what I experimented with. Everything I tried failed 
miserably... EyeTV, QuickTime, current and past builds of VLC, mplayer, 
pretty much anything that could decode MPEG2 to the screen. When I 
compiled command line MPEG like ffmpeg which decoded to null, and that 
was the only thing that proved to perform well enough, so I knew that 
my system could handle the raw MPEG 2 decoding.

So after quite a bit of playing, I have found that 0.7.2 works great 
provided that OpenGL is setup and a few other settings properly 
configured. It virtually eliminates the issues with slow YUV/RGB 
conversion. The performance goes from unwatchable to beautiful for even 
the most complex, high data rate 1080i and 720p transport streams. Even 
for lower resolution stuff, the video resizing is absolutely 
beautifully fluid, instead of jerky and problematic like in 0.8.2. And 
for fun, you can always apply OpenGL effects with no performance hit. 
On lower-end machines, this makes DVD playback work smoothly for once, 
and lowers laptop battery usage while increasing available CPU time in 
most situations.

When will we see this feature in a newer build? I miss having easy GUI 
control of post processing and an equalizer, not to mention that 
keeping two versions on hand gets annoying (some newer formats and 
stuff doesn't work on 0.7.2!)

Is there any chance we'll see better de-interlacing performance as 
well? Some of the de-interlacing features (particularly the better, 
higher-quality modes) cause playback issues - but I wonder if these 
could be accelerated, via OpenGL or better G4 optimization. I know my 
Radeon 9700 has an awful lot of additional GPU time available, even 
when handling HDTV....

Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) will probably hand off all this YUV conversion 
stuff to the GPU nicely through core graphics and whatnot, but until 
then, can we get a version of VLC working great? We already have the 
technology, just incorporate it properly! With all these Mac minis out 
there with G4s along the lines of my machine, I bet a lot of people 
will be hooking these things up to their HDTVs. With a small size, 
FireWire to import HDTV and DVI out to play back the video, people are 
going to want to start using these with their HDTV sets... and VLC will 
be the perfect solution.

Thoughts anybody?

-Galen

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