VLC 2 vs. alsa & SDL

[Galaxis]

In the past couple of days, I've been dabbling with a build of the VLC 2.0.5 sources (which is terribly botched for an environment like cdevtools, where things are not where they usually are).

I now have a working binary, but it's not really better in any way than the existing VLC 1.x on the repo - actually it's worse, because sound stutters. Not been able to confirm if the ARM optimizations in VLC 2 have any effect either.

Question one - I've built VLC with the alsa libraries. Is that the correct thing to do for the Pandora, or are there better options? Or does alsa require some special treatment?

Question two - SDL video output always seems to work as an overlay, and it hides all the VLC UI elements (which is a problem especially in fullscreen). Is there a way to make that behave more like a normal window? Or should I try to build another output driver (which)?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

The OP driver is the omapfb.

 

[freamon]

I had a go at building vlc TwoFlower a while ago too. I got exactly the same problem with stuttering sound (although weirdly only on the OS I compiled it on - it disappeared when I tried it on an OS from a SD card). I gave up trying to figure it out. There seems to a trend towards using OSS for sound - maybe you could try that.

SDL always seems to be an overlay - I've never seen it as part of the normal window when using VLC on desktop computers. The other video driver to try is the default Linux one (I think it's called x11) - that'll give you UI controls, but the performance was worse than SDL when I tried it. I think I tried the framebuffer video driver too, but it was no better than x11.

 

[Galaxis]

SDL always seems to be an overlay - I've never seen it as part of the normal window when using VLC on desktop computers. The other video driver to try is the default Linux one (I think it's called x11) - that'll give you UI controls, but the performance was worse than SDL when I tried it. I think I tried the framebuffer video driver too, but it was no better than x11.

Hm, ok... The other option would probably be xcb, but it seems there are no xcb libs in the Pandora Angstrom feed.

I'll try portaudio though to see if that makes a difference for the sound.

 

[Galaxis]

Ok, got a working version with xcb support, thanks to the codeblocks PND. It's slower than SDL, but now video can be played in the main window, and all the UI elements work. I get errors with the LUA and http plugin, though. Sound is still wonky - it works when video decoding is fast enough (on low res mpeg videos, for example), but starts to stutter heavily as soon as the video decoder starts falling behind.