The VideoLAN Forums

David Reveman from Novell added a little plugin to compiz which enables video player programs to render video
efficiently on a composited desktop. See: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/c ... 01658.html

I enabled this plugin by one click on my openSUSE 10.3 and compiled MPlayer with a few hundred lines patch applied to it. This path is also written by David Reveman AFAIK. See http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2007/10/ ... ideo-card/ for a little help on using MPlayer with this little patch. The user experience is AWESOME!

Let's see http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?p=32136 for some user reviews.

As I mentioned earlier, for MPlayer only a few hundred lines long patch is necessary. David Reveman advises the mediaplayer developers to implement this feature in a separated video output module, and Matthias Hopf from Xine already promised to implement it in their player (see: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/c ... 01676.html).

Dear VideoLAN developers! I beg you to add Compiz Video Playback Plugin support to VLC.
It make possible fully composited video playback even on weaker video cards, running AIGLX and generates very low CPU load while it works very smoothly.

that looks nice, however there is a need for some understanding of X

I added this feature easily to MPlayer by applying the patch, only compiling took some time. Compiz works (almost) out of the box on openSUSE, and enabling the Video Playback Plugin takes just a click. A user need not to have any expertise of X at all. And it wold be much easier if the player (e.g. VLC) would include it as a standard feature.

The implementing developer of course must have a deep understanding of X. But if he/she is a developer, then he/she must be already an expert AFAIK. Just consider the fact that it only took a patch of six hundred lines for MPlayer to support it! Only one source file (libvo/vo_xv.c) was patched, and its length only increased by around five hundred lines. This existing patch should serve as a guide for the developers of any media player.

I would love it if VLC had a support for this Compiz plugin. I have used it for a few days with MPLayer, but I'm absolutely amazed by this smoothness at a cost of so low CPU load.

I reported the lack of reference as a bug to Novell, since David Reveman the creator of Xgl and this plugin, works at Novell. He told me that a new major revision of the plugin will arrive in the future, and that proper docs and a reference client implementation will come with it.

(See: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=342354)