MythVideo and Mplayer

Apart from recording and watching TV the other thing we use the MythTV box for is the MythVideo plugin to watch all the Divx movies and other movie formats. Most of the Divx films are stored on a debian server and are NFS mounted to the MythTV server.

By default MythVideo will use the internal player for playback of all film types. This turned out to be a problem, I had collected a large selection of different films in various codecs and some of them would not play at all and some played with no sound.  I knew these files played ok because they had been on my old Myth box but there I had used mplayer as the default player so under Utilities/Setup->Setup->Media Settings->Video Settings->Player Settings I changed the default video player to be  mplayer -profile vdpau.

To make sure that mplayer used the nvidia ION chipset and VDPAU for playback I created a mplayer config file in the ~/.mplayer directory of the user that the MythTV fronted runs under and created the vdpau profile.

dougal:~/.mplayer$ cat config
[vdpau]
fs=1
tsprobe=8388608
quiet=1
vo=vdpau
ao=alsa
ao = alsa:device=hw=0.3
# Specify the mixer device.
mixer = default
mixer-channel = Master
ac=hwac3,hwdts,a52

The device number comes from the HDMI device in the aplay -l output :

dougal:~/.mplayer$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC662 rev1 Analog [ALC662 rev1 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC662 rev1 Digital [ALC662 rev1 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

mplayer seems to handle most codecs that you throw at it without any problems in playback and hardly use any CPU.