Well some might not of realized but I’ve been trying to get XvMC to work for my little via server for about a week or two now with mplayer. I have to say that its been a real pain in the ass. Mostly due to the fact that XvMC support that comes with mplayer, only works for nvidia. Yes I’ll say that again. The support for X video motion capabities….the nice ability to offload from the processor to the video card for mpeg2 rendering (which my little via has a nice chip for) doesn’t work with the default XvMC. Searching off and on for a week. I find that patches are outdated for mplayer to allow the via to use XvMC from openchrome. Mostly due to the fact that upstream mplayer, doesn’t seem to want to accept them accordingly to the openchrome people. Yet another example of confusion over the reasons behind the lack of seemingly cooperation in the open source community.

Manually went about creating a patch based off what I saw was needed and miraculously (thanks to the openchrome developers work on the patching initially) it works. I have on the little C3 1ghz gone from 50-60% cpu load to play a dvd..down to less then 5%. This is a huge change and allows for smooth playback which is great.

Well, rants over..I’m going to go watch some video’s etc with the use of a chip designed to allow it. Imagine that!