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.

-- 
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