[MPlayer-users] Re: Why can't I watch HD videos?

[Morris Beverly]

Tobias Diedrich wrote:
> Attila Kinali wrote:
>
>   
>> You hit here the I/O bandwidth barrier. The resolution is
>> now getting so high that transfering it to the graphics card
>> takes too much time. The only workaround for this problem
>> is to use DMA, but i don't know of any X11 driver that supports
>> this.
>>     
> Well, 1080p h264 works over here with some preparation:
>
>
> Still, some 100% CPU-Usage spikes now and then, but it plays without
> any "Error while decoding frame!" messages that like to pop up if
> the cpu is too slow.
>
> System:
> AMD64 3200+ (2000 MHz), Radeon X300 (r300 driver)
>
>   
Hi,

I've been able to play back 1792 x 768 avi files with mplayer on a dual
monitor setup with an athlon 64 X2 4600 and two gig of memory. This is
obviously, a pretty fast machine, but the real issue for me was the disk
drive.

I'm using a 150 gig 10K rpm drive (around 60 MB sustained read) which is
completely swamped with this file, but gets through 4 or 5 minutes
before it starts to finally choke a bit. It's possible that this is
where your problem is coming from also.

The 264 file may play simply because it's smaller on the disk (although
you obviously have some cpu usage issues with 264). Maybe you could
re-encode a short 30 second section of your original file into an mjpeg
format that will be smaller on disk, but still relatively easy to decode
cpu-wise, just to test this out.

morris