[MPlayer-users] Performance (too slow to play this)

[Roman Odaisky]

Greetings,

I’m trying to play HD files using mplayer on Ubuntu 8.10 (x86-32), and it was 
so far rather unsuccessful. It would just say, “Your system is too slow to 
play this” (also lots of “Too many video packets in the buffer”) and video 
would lag behind audio.

I’ve done a fair amount of googling, some advice helped more and some less, 
but none fully. So could someone please get it straight and tell me whether 
it’s a problem with hardware, or software, or PEBKAC maybe?

1. I have a 3 GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM and an Nvidia 6600GT. Does this 
provide sufficient processing power? What hardware would you suggest for 
watching HD movies comfortably?
2. mplayer 1.0~rc2. Has it improved significantly in SVN?
3. What works best (but not perfectly) is -lavdopts 
threads=2:fast=true:skiploopfilter=all:skipframe=nonref. -mc and -autosync 
don’t seem to help. What can be added here?

What’s strange is that A-V desync is only slight, less than 1%, and I can get 
rid of it by seeking in any direction, which seemingly causes both audio and 
video to restart from a given position, and then desync begins again to 
accumulate. That gives the impression that the system _almost_ copes with the 
load, however, if I enable -framedrop, playback becomes really jerky while it 
would seem it would have to drop only a single frame per several seconds.

So, am I missing something incredibly simple? Are there any magic options that 
would make HD playback smooth and with A-V sync, or should I replace some of 
the more outdated hardware?

By the way, speaking of hardware, would you recommend new Nvidia cards with 
VDPAU support, does it help and would it outweigh having to use a proprietary 
driver?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
WBR
Roman.