[MPlayer-users] mencoder selective verbosity

[Florin Andrei]

On Sun, 2002-11-10 at 05:14, Arpi wrote:
> 
> > Is is possible to get a more selective verbosity for mencoder, please?
> > When processing a certain video stream, i get a huge lot of "duplicate 1
> > frame(s)!!!", so many in fact that there's a significant CPU usage
> 
> you should not get many of them - it means bad framerate or sth.
> consider it as an warning/error message, instead of >/dev/null

You're right, thanks for the heads-up. I played with -fps and -ofps and
now i don't get that aweful lot of duplicate frames. Probably i messed
up the frames per second, now it's ok.

But still, even after fixing that, the problem persists. Here's why:
I do a 3-pass VOB-->DivX encoding. The first pass is very fast, i get
like 110 fps or something. Because mencoder prints out statistics at
every step (every frame), there's still a lot of information thrown at
xterm. As a consequence, the CPU usage due to xterm is still very high
(approx. 15-20%).
It is easy to reproduce: just run mencoder in xterm with some operation
that runs very fast and watch the CPU usage with "top". I betcha you
waste at least 10...20 fps because of the CPU usage in xterm.
See, i'm complaining because mencoder is too fast. :-)

In fact, this is not an issue of mencoder only. I've seen it discussed
on mailing lists of other media players and encoders: sometimes it's
good to have detailed statistics at every step, some other times it's
better to get statistics more rarely, like every 5...500 frames or
something like that. Perhaps a CLI flag that configures how often to
print statistics.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/