Comment 7 for bug 121476

Is there a reason for patching the xv driver to support both compiz video and xv instead of creating a separate compiz video output driver for mplayer, which would then fall back to xv if compiz video isn’t available? All other output methods have separate plugins (e.g. xv, x11, opengl, sdl, framebuffer).

Seems to me that hacking the compiz video functionality to the xv driver makes both harder to maintain and enhance. For instance, the xv driver only allows the OSD and subtitle overlays to be drawn to the original video frames before they’re scaled to the target size. On the other hand, the compiz video driver would be able to use composited overlays for OSD and subtitles. They wouldn’t be dependent on the video resolution and aspect ratio.

The opengl driver does that using separate textures. Not only does it look really nice, it allows the subtitles to be below the video image if the video doesn’t fill the entire screen vertically.