[MPlayer-users] GUI causes 100% CPU usage...

[Dan8827]

On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 02:03, DRAKe wrote:

> Friend of mine has got an Intel Celeron 433MHz processor based box, with 
> 384MB
> RAM and GeForce 2MX 400 64MB graphic card with nVIDIA binary drivers 
> installed.

> When he uses mplayer without GUI everything
> works just fine, plays movies fast and smooth, but when he launches 
> "gmplayer"
> and opens a movie CPU usage jumps to 100%, playback get lags and MPlayer
> returns, "Your machine is too slow...". We tried previous version of 
> MPlayer.

I've run into the same problem (my machine's even slower) - mplayer
plays smooth, but gmplayer drops frames and gives the "Machine's too
slow" message.  It seems that rendering the GUI draws a surprising
amount of CPU cycles.  

I've found that hiding the GUI after starting playback returned most if
not all of the performance lost.

I hardly use the GUI, and don't miss it.  Once I got used to a player
without a GUI, I found keyboard control much more precise.  I can zero
in a particular part of a long movie much more quickly and easily with
the arrow keys and page up/down than I could with a GUI "slider".  I
wish my DVD player had the same functions, rather than emulating the
rewind/fast-forward behavior of VCR's.

...I'm digressing.  Must be time to end this e-mail.

Regards.

-- 
dan8827
dan8827 at snet dot net