> > At least under XFree86 3.3.6 (no Xv extension, I believe), the quality is
> > something of a trade-off against what mplayer gives.  The picture appears
> > smoother in ogle, but the contrast is lower (and/or the value of each
> > color is lower).  As a result, black comes out as somewhat washed-out as
> > dark grey, rather than black.
>
> If you have the cycles to spare, you can get a very smooth picture
> from "mplayer" by applying the post-processing filters, e.g. "mplayer
> -vop pp -npp de".

Hm...interestingly, this particular option causes visible banding in
subtly-shaded regions.  (At least on a 16bpp display...maybe it looks
better on 24bpp?)

Thanks for pointing this out.  I thought that mplayer was going to refuse
to let me use postprocessing, based on error messages that I got whenever
I tried to do something that required postprocessing.



  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu