This is an experiment.
The change probably doesn't matter much.
One issue with the old code was that "large" images caused each sub-image
to be created and rendered as a new texture. "Large" in this case means
larger than 32x32 pixels, which actually isn't very large with screen
sizes beyond 1500x1000 pixels. This means rendering a simple subtitle for
a fullscreened video may allocate many small textures, one for each glyph.
On the other hand, the old code could be fixed by tuning the texture sizes
for "modern" work loads.
Also, the new code uses less deprecated OpenGL features and draws all
sub-images in one batch.
There are two possible issues the new code could cause:
- Drivers could have performance issues with the larger texture sizes and
the number of glTexSubImage2D calls on it
- There is only one EOSD texture, which could become full (it's enlarged
on demand, but restricted by driver texture size limitations)
It has been reported that this is faster on OSX with ATI GPUs than the old
code.
Compiling with full features requires development files for several
external libraries. Below is a list of some important requirements. For
more information see the output of './configure --help' for a list of options,
or look at the list of enabled and disabled features printed after running
'./configure'. If you think you have support for some feature installed
but configure fails to detect it, the file config.log may contain information
about the reasons for the failure.
Libraries specific to particular video output methods
(you'll want at least one of VDPAU, GL or Xv):
- libvdpau (for VDPAU output, best choice for NVIDIA cards)
- libGL (OpenGL output)
- libXv (XVideo output)
general:
- libasound (ALSA audio output)
- various general X development libraries
- libfreetype
- libfontconfig
- libass
- FFmpeg libraries (libavutil libavcodec libavformat libswscale libpostproc)
Most of the above libraries are available in suitable versions on normal
Linux distributions. However FFmpeg is an exception (distro versions may be
too old to work at all or work well). For that reason you may want to use
the separately available build wrapper that first compiles FFmpeg libraries
and libass, and then compiles the player statically linked against those.