[MPlayer-dev-eng] N-buffering...

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 01:35:25PM +0200, 4664 wrote:
> Hi. Playing x264 encoded videos on my machine is quite taxing, using
> maybe 80% CPU. But even though I have 20% CPU left I still get jerky
> pan/scan motion. I suspect that this happens because the CPU is
> sometimes too slow to decode a frame within the 1/25th of a second that
> is available (for a 25fps movie). These occasional "difficult" frames
> (or set of frames) probably cause the problems.
> 
> Would it help to implement a video fifo of N frames? (Where N is perhaps
> 5 or 10). This would be like double-buffering but with N frames. If
> there are occasionally "difficult" frames to decode, the N-buffer would
> even it out. I realize that the N-buffer would affect A-V sync but that
> should be possible to solve...

Not possible to solve in MPlayer's architecture, and in fact this is
very difficult to solve in any single-task player.

> Perhaps this is already implemented but I haven't found it? How hard
> would it be to do?
> 
> I'm willing to give this a try but first I'd like to know what you guys
> think about it.

Won't be included. Try MPlayerXP (an old fork of MPlayer) if you want
this functionality...if it still works.

If I write a new player eventually it will be possible to do something
like this, but don't hold your breath..

Rich