audio/visual

[Erik Bågfors]

> 
> i think that the mplayer issue is that it needs lots of love while
> compiling to play nice. for instance, nearly all distributions ship
> mplayer without the many optimizations for specific cpus.
> even gentoo avoids enabling cpu optimizations unless you enable this for
> yourself. so for good performance in mplayer i found compiling your own
> is mostly necessary.

1) try
apt-cache search mplayer and you'll find
mplayer-386 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-586 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-686 - transitional dummy package which can be safely removed
mplayer-custom - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-doc - Documentation for mplayer
mplayer-fonts - Fonts for mplayer
mplayer-k6 - The Ultimate Movie Player For Linux
mplayer-k7 - transitional dummy package which can be safely removed

So, you are simply wrong that ubuntu doesn't enable cpu opimizations.

2) mplayer will also do some cpu opimizations in real time. (which is
why 686 is now included in 586 I guess?)
Compiling from source doesn't always make things better/faster/cooler,
even if your friendly gentoo guy tells you so.

Regards,
Erik