[arch-general] 1080p playback

[Paulo Santos]

Greetings everyone,

I've been having some issues playing 1080p movies, performance wise.

I have a 8800GTS, the 640MB one, and a Core 2 Duo 6600 running at 2,4GHz.

By default, with the regular mplayer, it uses 50% of the CPU (100% of 
one core?) and after a while the movie starts lagging, desynchronizing 
video/sound. If I seek forward or back the sync gets fixed so I'm 
guessing it's not the movie's fault.

I tried installing mplayer-vdpau-nogui from AUR. The installation ended 
with some problems, but it was compiled. I found it under 
/var/aur/something and tried running ./mplayer -vo help but vdpau wasn't 
listed there.

Wikipedia [1] says vdpau supports 8800GTS 640, but several other places 
says it doesn't. This card has VP1, so, from what I read, at least a 
part of the processing can be put on it, wonder if vdpau will ever 
support it.

If vdpau really doesn't support it, is there a way for me to watch 1080p 
movies on my machine? Maybe some kind of patch to mplayer that makes it 
use both cores or something...

Thanks in advance,
Best regards,
Paulo Santos

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU