Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2003/11/09/0001.html

FWIW:

My impression originally was that mplayer was at least as fast, and produced
better quality images.

Last I tried both, they seemed about the same at the standard/default
resolution (though I confess to never checking CPU idle percentages).
But in fullscreen mode, ogle didn't seem to break stride, while mplayer
would start dropping a lot of frames.  (But mplayer looks *much* better
than ogle, in those cases.)

It's also worth noting that mplayer's performance perks up if it can't
find the audio track.  The difference is substantial enough to make me
wonder if they aren't doing some kind of busy-wait on sound-channels.
There might be something fairly simple to do to bring its performance
up to match ogle's.  (Then again, the performance difference *could* be
entirely due to not having to decode soundtracks, so there may be no
easy gains.)


Ogle also generally works better in terms of setting up and playing a
DVD.  mplayer has to be told which track to play from, and often (in my
experience) needs special instructions for finding the audio.  Ogle provides
the DVD menu and always(?) finds the sound.

mplayer gets a small nod for not htting you over the head with the warnings
about copyrights, however.  Strange as it may seem, after using mplayer
primarily for about a year, I never once have had an urge to make copies of
my DVDs for other people---despite a near-total lack of reminders that it
is illegal.  Go figure.

If there's not a good reason not to use mplayer, that's my general choice.


(Right now, I can't use either since I moved the DVD drive to the AMD64
machine, and cannot presently build either ogle or mplayer on it.  Maybe
I'll switch back, or maybe I'll try to force mplayer to think that the
AMD64 is just an Athlon on steroids.)


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/