How to use a Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus and/or a Creative DXR3 by David Holm ============================================================================== Thanks goes out to Daniel Bell for the donation of a brand new 20GB IBM harddisk. 1. Requirements * First of all you will need the DXR3/H+ drivers properly installed. Version 0.12.0 or later. You can find it at http://dxr3.sourceforge.net/ (you only need to run "make install devices" in em8300-x.y.z/modules not in the root dir) * Run /configure and make sure that DXR3/H+ support = yes if you want to play files other than mpeg libmp1e should be = yes as well From here on compilation (of at least my code ;) should go without any problems. 2. Usage -vo dxr3:::Where noprebuf specifies to turn off prebuffering. This is done automatically on athlons. If playback is out of sync try disabling prebuffering. If noprebuf is left out prebuffering is enabled (except on athlons). = fame/avcodec, avcodec produces better quality output, but fame is faster for those of you with slow machines. The default is to use libavcodec. Note that you need libavcodec properly installed (read DOCS/codecs.html) = device number to use in case you have more than one em8300 card Any of these options may be left out, but they must be specified in this order i.e. dxr3:fame works, dxr3:1 works but dxr3:1:avcodec will not. These new features were added by XorA, he usually hangs out in #dxr3 on irc.openprojects.net, let him know you like it... -ao oss:/dev/em8300_ma-X For audio output, where X is the device number (0 if one card) -ac hwac3 For digital audio output instead of analog -vc mpegpes For hardware accelerated mpeg playback -aop list=resample:fout=48000 If samplerate is below 44100Hz This does not work with digital audio output (-ac hwac3) MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VCD and DVD Notes There are some important notes to take into account here for optimum playback. MPlayer currently does not autodetect that the dxr3 can playback mpegs. So for mpeg files, dvd's and vcd's you have to add -vc mpegpes to tell mplayer that you are using a hardware accelerator. Otherwise mplayer will decode the movie in software, which is much slower. Note that you cannot use -vc mpegpes with movies that aren't mpeg 1 or 2 or you will get an error message saying "Can't find codec for video format...". 3. Contacting me You can contact me either by e-mailing me, or by using icq: 798427 Feedback, bugreports and general suggestions are appreciated (preferably by e-mail).