| 2007-11-29 02:51:55 |
Bogdan Butnaru |
description |
Binary package hint: vlc
It's a shame that even with Compiz working very well now, there is no suitable VLC output plugin that allows all the nice visual features to work correctly.
I've tried everything I have installed by default:
* X11 is the only one where Compiz effects work: Shadows are displayed correctly over running video, transparency works both for the VLC window and for windows above the video, and the window is correctly transformed by effects (eg, the cover-view task switcher).
However, the video scaling is atrocious: it seems that only basic resizing is used, which looks horribly pixelated. Worse, subtitles are rendered in the video resolution, so even those are pixelated when the video is scaled (eg, full-screen).
* XVideo looks great (eg, nicely-scaled, and even subtitles look good). However, all effects are broken: since only the "overlay patch" is seen by Compiz, shadows are drawn as black or green blobs, window transforms don't work (although when the transformed patch happens to appear over the "normal" area with the normal colors we get a patch of untransformed video), and any transparency disables the video.
* The GL output is even worse than XVideo: it's simply drawn over everything, including VLC's menus (which are virtually unusable).
* Funnily enough, the ASCII-art module actually works great—all transformations work correctly. But... it's ASCII.
Something should be done to allow better interaction between VLC and Compiz's effects. I suppose an upgrade to the X11 mode would work (if I understand correctly it just paints the video on a normal window), perhaps using OpenGL in a background buffer to do pretty scaling, and drawing the OSD (including subtitles) above it, _after_ scaling. This is probably not lightning-fast, but that would only be a problem with HD video, which I don't expect to work through Compiz anyway except on very high-end machines. We might add some kind of automatic fall-back to whatever is the most efficient display mode in huge-video cases. |
This concerns Ubuntu Gutsy (and earlier versions). It was written for VLC, but you can substitute [mplayer|totem|other video players] for VLC anywhere in the following and it's still valid.
It's a shame that even with Compiz working very well now, there is no suitable VLC output plugin that allows all the nice visual features to work correctly.
I've tried everything I have installed by default:
* X11 is the only one where Compiz effects work: Shadows are displayed correctly over running video, transparency works both for the VLC window and for windows above the video, and the window is correctly transformed by effects (eg, the cover-view task switcher).
However, the video scaling is atrocious: it seems that only basic resizing is used, which looks horribly pixelated. Worse, subtitles are rendered in the video resolution, so even those are pixelated when the video is scaled (eg, full-screen).
* XVideo looks great (eg, nicely-scaled, and even subtitles look good). However, all effects are broken: since only the "overlay patch" is seen by Compiz, shadows are drawn as black or green blobs, window transforms don't work (although when the transformed patch happens to appear over the "normal" area with the normal colors we get a patch of untransformed video), and any transparency disables the video.
* The GL output is even worse than XVideo: it's simply drawn over everything, including VLC's menus (which are virtually unusable).
* Funnily enough, the ASCII-art module actually works great—all transformations work correctly. But... it's ASCII.
Something should be done to allow better interaction between VLC and Compiz's effects. I suppose an upgrade to the X11 mode would work (if I understand correctly it just paints the video on a normal window), perhaps using OpenGL in a background buffer to do pretty scaling, and drawing the OSD (including subtitles) above it, _after_ scaling. This is probably not lightning-fast, but that would only be a problem with HD video, which I don't expect to work through Compiz anyway except on very high-end machines. We might add some kind of automatic fall-back to whatever is the most efficient display mode in huge-video cases. |
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