Monday, February 18, 2008

SMPlayer Vista Aero Integration - OpenGL

MPlayer is the best video player, ever. It's also open source, and more versatile than Video Lan Client (VLC). On Windows platforms, MPlayer for Windows - contains SMPlayer, MPUI, MPlayer and codecs in a convenient package.

The problem is it will revert to Aero basic when running on Vista. Here's how to fix that:

Open SMPlayer - go to Options - Preferences (Ctrl -P) - General - Output Drivers - Video - select GL:



Go to the Interface Tab and pick the "Windows Vista" style.



Go to the Advanced Tab - Check "Run MPlayer in it's own Window".



Enjoy:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

funny how we hit the same problems at nearly the same time :P
the mplayer things sucks bad ass - got an nvidia card to (8600gs). gl/gl2 works fine with mplayer standalone. also, no reboot is required for vista 32bit after updating drivers... one of my first vista bugs was a crashing display driver. screen went black, reloads a couple of time, and is fine again - pretty impressive

cmihai said...

Then the bug was probably in the NVIDIA drivers. As of Windows Vista, it uses the User-Mode Driver Framework, so if an error occurs, it can restart the driver without restarting the system (BSOD, etc).

Of course, there is a performance hit to having video, audio and such drivers (mostly) in userland. Context switches between user and kernel mode can be a bit taxing on the system, that's why Vista seems to take a 10% or so performance hit in most graphical benchmarks. But if you ask me, it's totally worth it.

In time, the performance hit won't be noticeable, and vendors will improve their drivers, and you'll end up with a more stable system overall.

Daniel Stuparu said...

really good stuff, thanks for the tip ;)