Video playback problem solved

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:00:22AM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote

> Well sse matters to video decoding.  That's what many distributions
> have optimized versions of mplayer and such.

  That doesn't provide full benefit, unless you optimize all the
packages that mplayer depends on.  I ran "equery" (a Gentoo-specific
tool) to list all dependancies of mplayer.  Here are the packages I have
installed that mplayer depends on...

app-arch/bzip2-1.0.6-r3 
sys-libs/zlib-1.2.5-r2 
sys-libs/ncurses-5.9 
virtual/libiconv-0 
media-libs/win32codecs-20071007-r4 
app-arch/unrar-4.0.7 
dev-util/pkgconfig-0.26 
virtual/opengl-7.0 
media-libs/freetype-2.4.8 
virtual/jpeg-0 
dev-lang/yasm-1.1.0-r1 
media-libs/libpng-1.5.6 
media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.24.1 
virtual/ttf-fonts-1 
media-libs/giflib-4.1.6-r2 
dev-libs/libxslt-1.1.26-r2 
media-libs/a52dec-0.7.4-r6 
media-video/rtmpdump-2.3 
x11-libs/libXext-1.3.0 
media-libs/libvorbis-1.3.1 
x11-proto/videoproto-2.3.1 
x11-proto/xf86vidmodeproto-2.3.1 
x11-proto/xf86dgaproto-2.1 
x11-proto/xineramaproto-1.2.1 
x11-proto/scrnsaverproto-1.2.1 
media-libs/fontconfig-2.8.0-r1 
media-libs/libass-0.9.13 
dev-libs/fribidi-0.19.2-r1 
media-sound/lame-3.98.4 
media-libs/x264-0.0.20110426 
media-libs/xvid-1.2.2-r2 
media-libs/libmng-1.0.10-r1 
media-sound/mpg123-1.13.2 
x11-libs/libXxf86vm-1.1.1 
x11-libs/libXxf86dga-1.1.2 
x11-libs/libXv-1.0.6 
media-libs/libtheora-1.1.1 
x11-libs/libXvMC-1.0.6

...and those are just the direct first level dependancies.  If I listed
the dependancies for these packages, the output would get really ugly
really fast.  I repeat, it isn't enough to merely optimize mplayer itself.

* mplayer video calls X, so you have to optimize all of X
* mplayer audio calls alsa, so you have to optimize all of alsa
* if you're playing streaming audio/video, it helps to optimize all the
  networking code
* the calls are, in many cases, handled by the kernel, so you have to
  optimize the kernel
* etc, etc.  Optimize the entire system, and be done with it.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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