video playback with compiz

Sunday, 29. November 2009 10:16 - daniel - Other - 0 Comments


Video playback with compiz running is pretty slow and sometimes there are some nasty glitches, like not being able to go to full screen mode, black video etc. Some of this is because of how compiz handles the video. But the good news is there is a way to get good video playback with compiz running.

There is a patch for mplayer 1.0rc2 that lets mplayer use some compiz functions to draw the video. You need to have the video plugin enabled in compiz for this to work.

First we need to get the mplayer sources.

apt-get build-dep mplayer
apt-get install build-essential
apt-get source mplayer

Navigate to mplayer-1.0~rc2/libvo, download the patch and apply it.

patch -p0 vo_xv.c mplayrepatch.patch

Now you should update debain/changelog to create a new version of the package and build and install the package with

fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us
dpkg -i mplayer_1.0-rc2-0ubuntu17_i386.deb
I tried this with ubuntu 8.10 intrepid. If newer versions of ubuntu ship with a version of mplayer that is incompatible with the patch you have to get the mplayer1.0rc2 source code from the mplayer site.

Video playback should work now without problems. There are some other goodies apart from decent video playback speed and working full screen mode, but these two were the most important for me.



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