Well I finally got round to playing with mplayer/mencoder on my new athlon64 3500+ box…

Playing DVDs

On Gentoo GNU/Linux, you’ll need to set your /etc/make.conf flags appropriately, or mplayer won’t be able to play dvd’s. Here’s my setup :

#/etc/make.conf
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically built this stage
# Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example
CFLAGS=”-O2 -march=athlon -fomit-frame-pointer”
CHOST=”i686-pc-linux-gnu”
CXXFLAGS=”${CFLAGS}”
MAKEOPTS=”-j1″
USE=”X gnome dvd dvdread dvdlib”

To be honest, I’m not sure which of the dvd flags turns on the appropriate support, but mplayer now manages to play from dvd.

Also, you may need to create a /dev/dvd node in /dev :

ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

In this case, my dvd player is setup as /dev/hdc, but I think mplayer needs to see it as dvd.

Mencoder

I initially ran mencoder on my test .vob data and got a crummy 35 fps encoding rate. And this is after cranking my memory bios settings to 2,2,2,5. But looking at the initial status page from mencoder showed that the program was compiled with only basic i686 support.

To remedy this, it was necessary to change

CFLAGS=”-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer”

to

CFLAGS=”-O2 -march=athlon -fomit-frame-pointer”

Now mencoder ran at a much better 80 fps. This is more than twice the 35fps encoding rate of my Compaq (HP) Presario AthlonXP 3000+ machine !

I think this certainly shows that the mplayer folks are right when they recommend building it from source.

Encoding Rates

* These are approximate only, and the windows versions were *not* recompiled for the specific processor. However, on Windows, the pre-built mencoder binaries will use SSE etc., I believe, though it is not optimal.