freevo tweaky follow-up

So a bit more tweaking later, I have improved my freevo setup EVEN MORE. For super-awesome NVIDIA love:

Here's the sneakiness...

in local_conf.py, you want to set up something like this:

MPLAYER_ARGS = { 'mkv' : '-vo vdpau -sid 0', 'mp4' : '-vo vdpau -demuxer lavf -sid 0', 'default' : '-vo vdpau -cache 5000 -sid 0' }

MPLAYER_VF_INTERLACED = '' MPLAYER_VF_PROGRESSIVE = ''

and in ~/.mplayer/config - for whatever user you run freevo as - you want:

vo=vdpau,xv, vc=ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffvc1vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,

the redundancy is because freevo likes to pass its own explicit -vo settings at the start of the mplayer command line, which overrides the preference you set in .mplayer/config. So you have to set freevo's config file to force it to pass -vo vdpau later in the mplayer command line. But I still set it in ~/.mplayer/config just for when I call mplayer manually for some reason.

That will get you VDPAU output always and VDPAU-accelerated decoding whenever possible - the vc= line is the magic, it tells it to try each of the VDPAU decoders in turn and then fall back to whatever mplayer would otherwise use if none of them work. The MPLAYER_VF_* lines are very important, because if you don't override it this way, Freevo likes to try and do some post-processing on all video playback, and the post-processing settings it uses aren't compatible with VDPAU. Took me half an hour of wall/head interfacing to figure that out. This just disables all post-processing. If you watch a lot of interlaced video this might give you trouble (investigate a very recent SVN mplayer and vdpau's own deinterlacing options...), but I don't, so I don't care.

Another line you can stick in ~/.mplayer/config if you have S/PDIF connection to a surround sound receiver:

ac=hwac3,a52,

that will do hardware AC-3 / Dolby Digital passthrough whenever it makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, it just does normal audio playback.

I realize this is all a bit vague, but hopefully it makes sense to anyone else who's ever bloodied themselves on Freevo's configuration files, and may be of use to some of them :)

So now my HTPC uses its video card to decode just about anything I throw at it, and that zonking great dual-core CPU I put it in feels a bit useless. Hmm. Oh well!

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