[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: using pthreads with mplayer

[Oded Shimon]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 05:19:14PM -0100, Andrea Palmat? wrote:
> At 13:37 05/07/2005, you wrote:
> >lol, there are no pthreads in MPlayer, at all. Disregarding -cache, MPlayer
> >is a completely single-threaded program. You're possibly thinking of
> >MPlayerXP, which is a threaded version of MPlayer. The way it works is by
> >making threads to decode the picture, and a single thread which each time
> >shows a new frame on the VO. Whether this speeds this up or not is
> >debatable, but not here.
> Strange because i've found in the config.h i've found:
> 
> /* Define this if your system has pthreads */
> #define HAVE_PTHREADS 1
> 
> and in config.mak
> 
> HAVE_PTHREADS = yes
> 
> searching thru the code i've found a pthread.c (in libavcodec) that is 
> compiled on my system. so it is useless?

In MPlayer, yes. I was gonna mention it, then figured no point. Since 
libavcodec is a general library, it works for other programs, and some 
programs use it's threads feature for _encoding_ (afaik, it can't do 
threaded decoding, atleast not within the library). Threaded encoding is 
lower quality than regular encoding, and most likely not faster at all 
unless you have SMP. See FAQ at http://ffmpeg.sf.net for why it's lower 
quality.

I find it odd though that MPlayer's configure checks for it, seems 
redundant...

- ods15