[MPlayer-cygwin] my machine is too slow?

[Corey Hickey]

PBVillaflores at smart.com.ph wrote:
> Seems the CPU utilization I am seeing when utilizing mplayer is higher
> than what it should be.  I've compared the utilization on media player
> classic running a file at 2x speed against mplayer running at 1x,
> mplayer still comes out higher.  I wonder why that is.

That's odd. I did a bit of superficial testing on my early-model P4 
laptop running Windows a couple months ago and mplayer was about 50-100% 
faster than MPC. Are you by any chance running a version of mplayer 
optimized for the wrong CPU, i.e. an AthlonXP build?

> MPlayer Sherpya-MinGW-20060323-4.1.0 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
> CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Celeron D Prescott; Xeon Nocona (Family: 15, Stepping: 4)
> CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 0 SSE2: 0

It's a little odd that SSE/SSE2 aren't detected; I don't think that 
should affect much, but it may be a symptom of an actual problem.

> VIDEO:  MPEG1  720x480  (aspect 12)  29.970 fps  1133.6 kbps (141.7 kbyte/s)

A file like this should play fine on something like a 400 MHz x86 
system, so there's clearly a problem somewhere.

> AO: [dsound] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
> Starting playback...
> VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
> Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
> Opening video filter: [scale]
> VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
> Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
> SwScaler: using unscaled Planar YV12 -> BGRA special converter
> VO: [directx] 720x480 => 720x540 BGRA

For testing purposes, does it work better with either or both of '-ao 
null' and '-vo null'?

-Corey