[MEncoder-users] Preview while encoding

[R.L. Horn]

On Mon, 2 Jun 2008, Levente Novák wrote:

>> Hmm, cool... and what options do you suggest for mplayer not to produce
>> too much load (and to prevent mencoder producing too many skipped frames)?
>> Because ecoding from capture card needs real time processing...

> Nothing unfortunately -- I wasn't able to decrease reliably the system
> load under 80% with a Celeron D 3.06GHz + 512 MiB RAM when using
> software compression and DV as output format even without on-line
> display of the result.

You can play around with scheduling priorities some using nice (assuming 
linux or some other POSIXy operating system).

If you're *really* feeling adventurous (i.e. reckless) download and build:

   http://www.eastcheap.org/tarballs/antinice-1.1.3.tar.gz

which will allow you run mencoder (or anything else) with absolute 
priorities greater than 0 (round-robin priority 1 is sufficient to trump 
most other processes).  It might help, it might make things worse...heck, 
depending on the options you feed it (and how the kernel is configured), 
it might lock up your system entirely.