[MPlayer-users] Optimization for a slow CPU

[Jan Knutar]

On Thursday 07 September 2006 19:35, Grant wrote:

> Why wouldn't everyone use -framedrop though?  It seems like if the
> system has enough resources it won't drop any frames, and if it runs
> low, dropped frames are better than stopped audio and/or video.

With accelerated video output, the transfer of frames from cpu/ram
to graphics board takes negligible effort, and dropping frames frees
very little CPU. The result is more along the lines of either a frozen
picture or a moving picture. With framedropping disabled, this results
in a picture that movies a bit too slowly sometimes, and catches
up eventually. For example in very complex scenes it might fall
behind a bit, and then catch up. Or, if there's some background CPU
activity, you wont get annoying stalls.

That framedropping helps you so much might be a sign that your
video out driver in MPlayer isn't accelerated. It would perhaps
be useful if you would paste the output of MPlayer so we might
see what driver MPlayer uses... You could also try -vo xv, for the
accelerated Xvideo driver. A celeron 700 should do DVD fine
with xvideo.