[MPlayer-users] Containers

[Stephen Mollett]

On Monday 02 Apr 2007, Mattia wrote:
>>> and mplayer eats a lot of cpu while playing it on my laptop (1.8GHz).
>> Playing what, exactly? Which VO/AO are you using? Post mplayer -v
>> file.mkv output.
> well, with "a lot of cpu" I mean compared to xvid/mp3/avi.
> ...
> Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
> ...
> Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio)
> decoder)

You're not comparing like with like - you're comparing xvid/mp3/avi with 
h264/aac/mkv. H.264 is rather more CPU-intensive to decode than xvid 
(MPEG4-ASP). If it was xvid/mp3/mkv, it should use the same amount of CPU as 
the AVI version. (Try stuffing the streams from one of your AVIs into an MKV 
with mkvmerge then playing it, perhaps? The CPU difference should be 
negligible.)

Regards,
Stephen