[MPlayer-users] mplayer cache option greatly reduces performance

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 03:08:19PM +0300, Ilya Basin wrote:
> Hi. I needed a larger cache because I have some videos stored on
> another samba server and it's laggy.
> I set options: cache=20000, cache-min=10 , and that helped to play
> those videos smoothly,
> 
> But that caused all 1280x720 mp4 files stored
> on my local drive to lag and A/V desync with mplayer message:
> **** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
> 
> I tried cache values from 1000 to 80000, and they lag in any case. But
> without the option "cache" these videos play well.

Try with different -cache-seek-min values and -demuxer mov.
Possible causes in addition of suboptimal behaviour of the mov demuxer
are bad/insufficient interleaving in the files.

> In short, even with -nocache they play faster than with any cache. Unoptimized? Broken?

The cache optimizes only linear reads. The mov/mp4 design easily leads to
cases where the seek performance is dominant, not the linear read.