Crystal player

[arman68]

I am starting a new thread on Crystal Player since I feel I was hi-jacking the MPC thread.

I have discovered Crystal Player from http://www.crystalplayer.com recently and I think it is one of the best player around. I was looking for a player to integrate with myHTPC and have tried most of the movie players.

What sets apart Crystal Player from the others for me is its great looking OSD in the hardware video overlay. With all other players the OSD is superimposed to the display and do not appear on TV. I use the DVDMax feature from my Matrox G400 fro playing movies as it greatly enhance the display (it uses the video overlay in YUY2). I believe ATI has a similar feature called Theatre (or something like that) and I know ATI users have the same problem with the OSD not being visible. To be fair BSPlayer uses the overlay as well, but its OSD and features are nowhere as advanced as CrystalPlayer.

There is a free version which is sufficient for my needs, but the shareware versions adds some interesting features.

FYI I also use the additional codecs:

* DivXG400: automatic cropping and overscan compensation (all user configurable) to fill up the screen area, whether 4:2 or 16:9, plus automatic switching of TV mode from PAL to NTSC depending on the movie framerate. IMHO this codec is a must, and contrary to its name you can use it with any video card and it does not matter what video codec you use (ie: not restricted to DivX)

* DVobSub: this has the best subtitling engine by far. I disable subtitling both in Crystal Player and DivXG400 (both of them can display subtitles as well).

Note: to load DivXG400 and DVobSub at the same time you need to set DivXG400 load mode to force

[arman68]

Originally posted by CruNcher
indeed crystalplayer has some nice features but did you ever watched the memory footprint only @ startup is ridicolus and if you play it fills even more.

The memory usage is actually a 'feature' of CrystalPlayer: it uses a video buffer in an attempt to get rid of playback problems with demanding video clips (ie: with a large buffer while playing back already decoded non-demanding video frames, the player can decode ahead demanding video frames). This buffer also allows the GUI to be superimposed to the image and appear in the video overlay.

When playback is just started cpu usage peaks for a little while as the player fills up the buffer.

FYI the buffer size is user configurable (minimum of 10% of available memory).

[wata]

i am using g400 dh as well
but i don't use the dvdmax feature, i use dual multi-display, when i want to view video on my TV-Out i just switch it to primary display and everything will appears with the player OSD, Subs etc whatever

btw, crystal player v1.50 crash when start on my system