XFree86 4.0 is a big step in efficiency, as far as being able to access
the video hardware more directly.  You can read more at
http://www.xfree.org .

I suspect that xanim itself is not nearly as efficient as Window$ Media
Player.  I know that smpeg, an mpeg player that Loki is working on,
gained a lot of performance between the first time I downloaded it, and
now.

-BVG

"Shawn T. Rutledge" wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Apr 16, 2000 at 01:26:27PM -0700, root wrote:
> > Using xanim the documentation would suggest
> > a few command line switches to "smooth" out the playback.
> > It is no different that changing buffer settings and other settings
> > in MS-MediaFlayer and RealFlayer.
> 
> Unfortunately due to the overhead of the X Window System, it may
> never be as fast as Windows' ability to go direct to the hardware
> through as few layers as possible.
> 
> Maybe with X running on top of the framebuffer interface, there
> would be a way to get direct access to the framebuffer API for the
> window area being used, so that the frames could be blitted to
> it at a faster rate.
> 
> Then again, xawtv does surprisingly well... I think they found a way
> to get direct access to a block of video memory, or something like that.
> 
> As for optimizing xanim to the extent possible, a big one that I
> noticed is that by default, it tries to load the entire movie into memory
> before playing it, which will take a long time and cause a lot of swapping.
> The flag to play directly from disk makes a big difference.  I don't know
> why that isn't the default setting because it usually works better.
> 
> --
>   _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
>  (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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