[MPlayer-users] "too slow" even with a modern system?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 04:36:06AM -0700, Grant wrote:
> >> I'm getting the "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" message even with:
> >>
> >> -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all:threads=4
> >>
> >> I'm trying to play a 1080p MTS file created by my Sony digital camera
> >> and video is smooth but audio is out of sync.  My system is a Dell
> >> XPS13 Ultrabook.  Is there anything I can do?

Since that seems to be a system with TurboBoost, it's not sure that
using threads is going to make it go much faster.
Also the processor in that computer seems to run at half the speed of
the desktop processors, whereas according to your output it would play
fine if it was just about 30% faster...

> > Hard to help you w/o showing us the complete command line and all output
> > generated.
> 
> Sorry about that, here is the output:
> 
> $ mplayer -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all:threads=4 00006.MTS
> MPlayer SVN-r33094-4.5.3 (C) 2000-2011 MPlayer Team

This is really old. It probably doesn't contain any optimizations at all
for your system (i5/i7).

> VIDEO H264(pid=4113) AUDIO A52(pid=4352) SUB Teletext(pid=4608)  PROGRAM N. 1
> FPS seems to be: 59.940060

Looks like it is indeed recorded at 60 fps, that is quite heavy to
decode.

> VO: [xv] 1920x1080 => 1920x1080 Planar YV12
> A:   2.9 V:   2.4 A-V:  0.491 ct: -0.017  82/ 82 128%  4%  2.0% 75 0

Note that vsync is not an issue, both because it generally isn't with
XVideo, and you can also see it from the CPU usage numbers "128% 4%
2.0%", vsync issues would cause the second to be large.
The first number says that decoding the video takes 28% more time than
what would be necessary to decode in real-time.
You can try adding skipframe=nonref, but I think the results will be bad.
I also couldn't figure out how many cores your CPU has. If it has 4, you
probably should use more than 4 threads.
If it has HyperThreading, it might help to disable it (in the BIOS I
think - it might make things slower though, that's completely
unpredictable).