[HLUG] Re: MPlayer problem...

[John Hedges]

> Back in those days when I used to play NFS2 on win98, the game
> had an option of changing the image quality by pressing F2; one
> of the option was "interlaced". In this option you get a lot of
> closely spaced horizontal lines on your screen (don't ask me
> why, I don't have a clue). Now my problem is not exactly that,
> but the video kind of slightly breaks up into closely spaced
> horizontal lines, and then it becomes OK agin. One second it's
> degraded, the next second it's OK... and so it goes on. 
> My apologies in advance for putting you guys through probably
> the most idiotic explanation ever, but honestly don't know how
> else to explain it.

It sounds like your video could be interlaced. It's a TV thing;
25 full frames per second made up from 50 interlaced frames per second.
The interlaced frames have alternate lines of image so one frame has the
odd lines and the next has the even lines. When you superimpose 2
adjacent interlaced frames you get jagged edges to objects that have
moved. Stationary objects look fine - is this what you are seeing?
You can de-interlace - transcode could help you there. Perhaps the x11
driver de-interlaces on the fly?

> Is it possible to take a screen shot of the video and then send
> it to you guy as attachment?? if so please let me know how to
> take screen shot of video in gmplyer.

A full screenshot might be a bit big for the list. Can you put one on
the web somewhere? If not, you can send one to me directly. If you have
gimp installed you can get the screen or contents of an individual
window under 'file->aquire->screen shot'.

> Also I am using a custom compiled 2.6.13 kernel, could it have
> any thing to do the problem??
> 
> Here are few more details on my machine, if it helps
> 
> Processor: Duron 850MHz
> RAM: 512 MB (running at 266MHz)
> AGP: 64MB (GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x) 
> I am using a driver that I downloaded from the nvidia site.

I doubt it's kernel, driver or hardware related, though if it were to be
any of these I'd first check out the nvidia driver mailing lists.

Cheers

John