Re: [xine-user] Re: Xv == XVIDEO (was: What's Xv ?)

[Guenter B. <bar...@st...>]

Hi Hetz,

> and bofore everyone asks about their cards - all the popular graphics cards
> (Matrox, NVidia, ATI, 3DFX, SiS, and even Trident & Cirrus Logic) - are
> supporting the Xv extensions...

are you sure about this? A card is supported by xfree 4.0.2 doesn't mean
that Xv is supported on that card. It can be quite some trouble getting Xv
to work. AFAIK XFree supports Xv only on matrox cards out-of-the-box. For
nvidia cards you need a binary driver available from nvidia and a kernel
module. For ATI cards you need GATOS drivers ...

> I really wonder why the development team are still concentrated on XFree
> 3.3.x support.

That's quite simple: we want xine to run on as many platforms as
possible. And we want it to run as it comes, out-of-the-box. Doesn't need
to run that fast but it should run. Most users are motivated to tune their
boxes if they see that it does at least _something_, so they're willing to
upgrade the software they use and maybe spend $20 on a new audio card. But
if we just bomb out with an error message "Xv extension needed" or even a
segfault, most people will be demotivated.

XFree 4 is fairly new, only the newest distributions contain it and many
of them fail to set it up correctly.

And what about Xv support on other platforms? Are there nvidia drivers for
FreeBSD? - no. Are there nvidia drivers for Linux/alpha (a port of xine to
that platform is currently being worked on) - no.

Regards,

   Guenter