Comment 66 for bug 755841

Thank you Dmitry for the follow up information on your patch. Your response led me to pursue other options.

One option I have been investigating is compiling VAAPI support into mplayer. I learned about this possibility at the following web site:
A NVIDIA VDPAU Back-End For Intel's VA-API
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_vdpau_vaapi&num=1

This site leads to the following code for compiling mplayer with VAAPI support:
Splitted-desktop systems - Video Acceleration (VA) API
http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/

I installed the Xorg Edgers PPA on my Kubuntu Natty Narwhal 11.04 system:
https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

Then I installed the necessary prerequisites:
    sudo apt-get install subversion yasm libxfixes-dev \
         libva1 vainfo i965-va-driver libva-glx1 libva-dev

The following command will install the mplayer dependencies:
    sudo apt-get build-dep mplayer

Next I downloaded, extracted, and compiled the VAAPI enabled mplayer. I used the ./checkout-patch-build.sh script to download the SVN version of mplayer and built it.

Then I tried running it with the following commands:
    cd mplayer-vaapi
    ./mplayer -vo vaapi -va vaapi /home/user/2041_20110420193000.mpg

Unfortunately this provided only sound on my system:
<... snip>
Playing /home/user/2041_20110420193000.mpg.
TS file format detected.
VIDEO MPEG2(pid=33) AUDIO A52(pid=36) NO SUBS (yet)! PROGRAM N. 1
VIDEO: MPEG2 1920x1080 (aspect 3) 29.970 fps 17500.0 kbps (2187.5 kbyte/s)
Load subtitles in /media/kubuntu1104/home/gedakc/tmp/
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.
<snip....>

Since the command failed to display any video output, I used the following command to list all of the valid video outputs for mplayer:
    ./mplayer -vo help

Unfortunately the vaapi option was not listed. ;-(

Then I tried using the gl2 video output with very promising results (no tearing):
    ./mplayer -vo gl2 -va vaapi /home/user/2041_20110420193000.mpg

I also tried using the gl2 video output with the default installed mplayer that does not have VAAPI support:
    /usr/bin/mplayer -vo gl2 /home/user/2041_20110420193000.mpg

To my surprise, this video played _without_ video tearing as well. :-)

I will need to experiment with this more to see how I might be able to get this to work with mythtv.

At the moment these results look very promising.