It is MPlayer.

And there would be many people who would disagree with you. As I said, that is your opinion... unless you can somehow prove that mplayer is better than all the other video players out there (good luck).

Shut up.

I didn't have the time to read the whole thread but still what I'm going to say might be of use to the OP:

I'm running Slackware 14.2 on a 2-in-1 laptop with a Celeron N3050 processor. I'm using the i915 kms driver (and Xorg automatically loads the intel driver).

When I compile stuff like mpv or MPlayer they automatically pick up whatever hw support there is, in this case, libva.

The thing is, with the stock Slackware packages, HW acceleration was good enough except when playing 10bit HEVC video (with large frame dimensions). Being upset about this, I started upgrading the stock libva and libva-intel-driver packages to the newer upstream versions as they came out. In the meantime the latter changed its name to intel-vaapi-driver. Especially with the 1.8.x branch things changed drastically and I can play all my videos smoothly now. The current vaapi driver is at the 2.x branch to which I didn't upgrade because I'd have to recompile too many things. But you can use the 1.8.3 version as a drop-in replacement for the stock 1.7.1 package.

Of course, the patches and performance numbers for my chipset may not be too relevant to yours, but if you want to squeeze every bit of performance you get out of the hardware, it might be worth considering upgrading to 1.8.3.

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@linuxbawks, this kind of behavior isn't acceptable at LQ. If you'd like to continue participating here, please refrain from it moving forward.

--jeremy

Thank you Ilgar!

Best answer so far.

As I wrote, I will use Slackware box exclusively for a video surveillance:
miniPC with i5-7200U, plenty of RAM and large disk for video recording. Its without fans, hidden and also without any iterfaces (monitor, keyboard, mouse), just like mini server.
The video surveillance program (Zoneminder) depends only on ffmpeg. So this is my main focus. As the replies here show, I've done all right and finish that point.
Other video apps are only for my curiosity as a long Slackware user - hobby.


Here I spent most of the time "catching the rabbit".
Finally I discovered:
1. Later Intel CPUs need a "speed up" firmware to be loaded at boot time (previous posts - DMC, GUC, HUC), provided by Intel and not described anywhere in Slackware documentation.
2. Kaby Lake CPU (mine) - libva-1.XX and intel vaapi driver return error on loading. So I tried latest, 2.1 version and worked.
3. as a result of previous point, all video applications compiled for a Slackware64-14.2 I'm using, failed to load. So I was forced to recompile ffmpeg-GIT and VLC-3.0.1 to pick up 2.1 libraries & Intel driver at compilation.

ffmpeg works 100% as verified by this comunity.
VLC (I don't need really) do not. It's fast but video is distorted - screenshot attached in one of my previous post.

I'm interested on mpv. Did you compiled 0.2.8.X? Older versions are not h.265 compatible, but this one require patched ffmpeg (dirty request, i do not like).



Regarding MPlayer:
At their site they state:
Over TWO YEARS OLD - Have not tested obsolete application. Hardware acceleration on modern CPUs for h.264, HEVC, UHD support...
This old one simply can not be the best video application.
But sorry, I might have not found (if any) new page of MPlayer.

And last:
linuxbawks - sorry, but your account should be disabled by LQ administrator.

That website links to daily snapshots as well as 'old' stable release, it's not mplayer fault you only read the header...

It's more like a multimedia engine, if you want 'video application' there's plenty to choose from...

Grab the snapshot sources from slackware-current repository, I have tested these, compiles with ffmpeg 3.4.2, works fine.

I have ffmpeg 3.4.2, MPlayer-20180208 and mpv-0.27.2 compiled against it. I didn't bother to attempt mpv 0.28.x because I'm satisfied with the current performance. I'm also keeping the libva upgrade on hold, as I have linphone and some other stuff that break with version 2.x. I chose to leave the big overhaul to when Slackware 15 is released.

By the way, I was a little inaccurate when I said mpv and mplayer pick up libva. mpv supports vaapi but MPlayer doesn't, actually that was the reason which forced me to switch to mpv.

To be fair, it was your choice of hardware that forced you into vaapi, because there is hardware that supports only vdpau and not vaapi.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read that vaapi is an effort to bring vdpau support to non-nvidia hardware.

I am certainly not an expert, but what I understand is, it is an effort along the lines you said. I take it as the Intel version of Nvidia's vdpau. It does emulate vdpau but it probably has some intel-specific optimizations, too.

So yes, my vaapi recommendation was meant to be only for those using on-board Intel HD graphics (these days with a dedicated video card, even with the weakest one, one need not worry about video decoding performance). My system is kind of on the low edge, that's why every bit of improvement makes visible difference.

Sorry, was too fast. Noticed snapshots later.
Mpayer works, but bad on my hardware. Tested HEVC UHD video on powerfull i7-6820HQ(4 core, 8 treads) and Windows 10 x64:
Mplayer response: "Your system is too SLOW to play this!"
VLC - excellent play
ffplay - play accelerated (high GPU load with max GPU frequency) but high CPU load

As of above, VLC & ffmpeg are both "multihardware", Mplayer ignores Intel. So a lot of users with Intel integrated graphics are deprived.
So instead of investing a money to nVidia, a logical decision is ...

Yes I am aware of that.
As I noted many times in my previous posts, I bought a miniPC (no place to insert additional video card) with modern CPU, capable of HW acceleration (Intel Kaby Lake, vaapi).
Have to point out again, as some do not read or want to understand:
1. I just want to squeeze a maximum from the hardware I have!
2. I need ONLY HW accelerated ffmpeg with my hardware
So please be so kind, to not suggest me other hardware (video cards as nVidia or else) Thank you very much.

As I've got confirmations for 2. above, let me say thank you all for a help.

Not quite. VAAPI is an effort to a hardware acceleration API for video en-/decoding. It's actually closer to nvidia's video codec SDK (NVENC/NVDEC) than it is to VDPAU, since VDPAU is decoding only. Both VAAPI and VDPAU were efforts for a vendor independent API, just with different scope.

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Thanks, this explains a lot. I had no need to encode, but decoding is a must (and all I got is geforce hw) so I guess I never had to run anything other than mplayer.

Since mplayer only supports vdpau, you can use the libvdpau-va-gl program I linked to before to allow mplayer to use your card. This program basically sets up a vdpau driver that translates vdpau calls into vaapi calls, which allows your Intel video card to provide proper acceleration. It isn't as good as native vdpau support, but it is much better than no hardware video accerlation (and it should be plenty good for what you're looking for).

But if you want native vaapi support, mpv is a better option for that (mpv is a fork of mplayer, but the developer is a little headstrong and has pissed some people off).