Quick XVideo/MPlayer Tip

19 Mar 2007 · #techtalk

Here’s another installment in my continuing series of posts wherein I write something that has the incredible effect of teaching some of you new tricks while simultaneously losing a member of my traditional readerbase!

Today, we talk about videos - specifically, playing videos with MPlayer. For whatever reasons, the proprietary nvidia drivers for X don’t support direct brightness, contrast control primitives. So I can’t adjust these picture settings on the fly when using MPlayer and the xv video out interface. The workaround is to use the video filter eq2 with mplayer that enables these features at the software layer. In fact, here’s my tiny ~/.mplayer/config file making use of that filter as a default:

# ~/.mplayer/config
monitoraspect=16:10
osdlevel=0
quiet=1
vf=eq2,pp=ac
channels=6
ao=alsa:device=surround51
double=yes

How do you know whether your X driver supports these video adjustment primitives? Run xvinfo from the shell and look for attributes like XV_BRIGHTNESS and XV_CONTRAST. If you don’t see them listed, time to start using the eq2 filter.

What does your MPlayer config file look like?