[MPlayer-users] MPlayer Slower Than Windows Media Player !!

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 05:50:56PM +0000, Roberto De Leo wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> >
> >
> >Try using -framedrop. From what I understand, WMP silently drops
> >frames without telling the user to maintain A/V sync, so it looks like
> >it's faster. But actually you're missing lots of frames... A Cyrix 233
> >is definitely not fast enough to play medium- to high-resolution
> >movies without dropping frames.
> > 
> >
> Hi,
> sorry for the not-strictly-on-thread-topic-message, but reading your 
> message I realized it is not clear from the mplayer man page whether 
> using  the "-framedrop" option when it is not strictly necessary can 
> "harm" the playback quality or not.
> Any hint would be greatly appreciated!

Without -framedrop, A-V sync can drift a little, and mplayer will try
to correct the situation as soon as it can (e.g. when it gets to a
part that takes less cpu time to decode). So it's mainly an issue if
your cpu is just borderline fast enough to play the movie... In this
case, without -framedrop, A-V sync will jump around slightly in the
very complicated frames of the movie, whereas with -framedrop,
framerate will drop/stutter when it gets to these scenes. IMO the
former is usually less noticable.

If your box is really slow, you probably always want -framedrop.

Rich