[MPlayer-users] How can I force mplayer to drop frames more consistently?

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 14:58 -0600, Dark Shadow wrote:
> I am trying to watch a 1920x1080/60p h264 file and -framedrop makes to
> video unwatchable due to dropping to many frames all at once making
> the video jumpy. I would like to force it to just drop every second
> frame which would make it a consistent 29.97 frame rate which is still
> very good.

The framedrop functionality can be improved, and I've tested enhanced
versions of it. However consistent "drop every second frame" is not
doable for all sources because of the way frames depend on each other;
you can't skip decoding of odd frames and only them if motion
compensation in even frames refers to the odd ones.

>  I am using vdpau but my card maxes out at decoding 48 1080p
> frames a second. Which is more then enough for any retail media but
> new camcorders have the option of 60 frames.
> 
> Lastly is their any chance that future ffh264vdpau codec of Nvidia
> driver refinement could result in better performance.

If you're using an svn version of MPlayer, then the better VDPAU support
in git can give improved performance. However the difference is unlikely
to be big enough to improve from 48 to 60. But there is another
alternative, using (possibly threaded) software decoding. Is there a
reason why you'd need to specifically use the hardware decoding in
VDPAU?

> Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU       Q 720  @ 1.60GHz

I think this should be plenty fast enough to do software decoding of 60
Hz 1920x1080 video with 4 threads.

If you haven't looked into threaded decoding before,
git clone git://repo.or.cz/mplayer-build.git
and see the README for some thread-related information. Depending on
your Linux distribution there may also be suitable binary packages.