[Mplayer-users] Mplayer speed

[Nate Delage]

I have been following/using mplayer for sometime, and the latest CVS is 
beautiful.

Last night I had a couple sparks of intelligence I think might be valuable to 
others with slow systems like mine.  Some, maybe most will already know 
everything I have to share in this mail, but I have read the DOCS and some of 
this was new to me, so here goes.

my setup:  AMD-K62 450mhz
           192meg ram
           2.4.4 kernel
           xfree 4.0.3 with xv drivers from gatos
           ATI RageIIc 4meg <===piece of crap
           Ensoniq AudioPCI <===using kernel drivers (OSS)

I had a vortex2 based card, but finally broke down last night and bought the 
ensoniq, which works perfect.

Bad sync:
1.  Even if the CPU usage to decode is 40% or whatever, this does not mean you 
are not dropping frames, use -framdrop and see if sync is fixed.

2.  Now you might see you are dropping all over the place, what I did last 
night, which was mentioned here at one point I think (and isn't in the docs i 
think) is to change the vertical refresh to something lower, I went from 85hz 
to 60hz.  This made playback go from choppy (but in sync) o smooth and in 
sync.  The only way I know to change this is to edit you XFree86 config file.

After having a divx movie on my computer for months, and never getting to 
watch it, I finally did last night with these tricks.  I also started X in the 
lowest resolution possible (large enough for the movie size obviously).  I 
guess matching the depth of the movie & X isn't a bad idea either.

Also if you have a ATI based card, try installing the xv drivers.  My card is 
very old and slow, and I never thought the xv drivers would work, but to my 
delight they did.  the install is very easy so give it a shot.

These steps are probably very obvious to most of you.  But to my knowledge 
they are not included in the DOCS.  So maybe they should be added.

Well done to all the mplayer developers.

Nate


_______________________________________________
Mplayer-users mailing list
Mplayer-users at lists.sourceforge.net
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mplayer-users