Limitations on XV output?

[Alex Deucher]

2012/4/25 Rogério Brito <rbrito at ime.usp.br>:
> Hi there.
>
> I just filed a bug report [0] in Debian's BTS saying that I am unable
> to play a video downloaded from youtube [1], whose dimensions are
> 2542x1080.
>
> [0]: http://bugs.debian.org/670236
> [1]: http://youtu.be/yQ5U8suTUw0
>
> Unfortunately, I have not been able to play said video (which I got
> with youtube-dl) on my Intel computers (I have one AMD, but it is not
> accessible right now to test), and, reading the source code of
> mplayer2 (or mplayer, for that matter), I saw that the limitation to
> play videos come from the dimensions of the buffers that XV reports to
> the player.
>
> In particular, mplayer2 tells me that it can only play videos with a
> maximum resolution of 2048x2048 pixels, and the execution of mplayer2
> is aborted at that point.
>
> So, my question is: is this a limitation in software or is this an
> intrinsic limitation of the hardware that Intel releases? For the
> record, I see this behavior on motherboards that have a 865 (a
> desktop) and a Sandy Bridge (notebook) chipset.

It's usually a hardware limitation.  The driver generally exposes the
hw limits as the Xv limits.  2kx2k seems about right for 865, but for
sandybridge I'd expect it to be higher.  In that case, the limits
could probably be increased in the driver, but the Intel guys would
know better.

Alex