WMV playback under Linux/MacOS?

[gboyce at badbelly.com (gboyce)]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Scott R Ehrlich wrote:

> There are a variety of web and usenet threads of people saying they try to play
> back Microsoft's WMV format files but they turn out choppy or slide-show-ish,
> when attempted from a Linux machine.
>
> I've experienced this myself, from problematic playback on my OS 10 G3 and much
> older P2 laptop when I've had linux on it.   Put Windows on the same P2 laptop,
> and wmv playback is perfect.
>
> So the question - is there a reasonable non Windows solution for good wmv
> playback?   If so, what is the magic?   I've played with Xine, mplayer, to name
> a couple, but no success with smooth playback.

When you used mplayer, what output plugin did you use?  Various plugins 
can give different performance levels (and have different levels of 
support on different hardware).

I've generally had good luck with the xv output plugin.

Also, if you still have windows for the P2 system, see if it plays well on 
windows.  Some more recent video codecs have higher resource requirements. 
You may be having a "doesn't play well on old hardware" problem rather 
than "doesn't play well on linux".

--
Greg

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.