[MPlayer-users] ssa/ass rendering uses lots of cpu with -vo gl

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 1 May 2011, at 23:01, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson at cox.net> wrote:
> It's the video driver, silly.
> 
> An NVIDIA GeForce 210 (modern but trailing edge as far as raw specs) plus the nvidia binary driver plus VDPAU will handle anything that mplayer can throw at it without the CPU breaking a sweat.

Unfortunately the video driver thing also works the other way (even though it matters not in this case): due to requiring SSE you can completely forget about using newer nVidia cards with old PCs.
But even nVidia had and probably has enough paths in the driver with really horrible performance, though it seems no longer in anything MPlayer uses.
And either way this sounds like it might be specific to having large borders due to aspect scaling, like when playing 16:9 content on a 4:3 display, something at least I haven't tested in a long time.