[MPlayer-users] mplayer and low end machines

[Roberto De Leo]

>
>
>false!
>i have p2-250mhz test machine with 128mb ram, and it plays both matrix.vob
>with 3% framedrop and the 1800kbps 620x576 sw ep1 DIVX3 trailer with 0
>framedrop well.  using a matrox g200... with the mga_vid kernel module...
>
Hmm... I believe Hentz was asking if he could get a decent playback 
quality using
_software_ acceleration.
My knowledge of mplayer is not very deep but as a rule of thumb I'd 
expect that
if hardware acceleration is available then also a PentiumI 100MHz can be 
enough...

I have a few info that may be useful about this:

using the "vesa" vo driver, that it is nicer than the svgalib driver 
because it requires
no special configuration for most of the video cards around, I get 
perfectly smooth
playback for DivX videoson my pretty old P1 166MHz w/ Matrox Millennium 
II and
32MB RAM.
Of course if you try zooming to get fullscreen the playback gets shity, 
but if the
original size of your video is already big enough then you can use it 
and be very
happy :-)

But it does not take much to get a decent playback with sw acceleration 
either:
I tested it with a few DivX on a PII 266MHz w/ Matrox G100 [=no hw 
acceleration]
and 64MB RAM and using the options
    -vo vesa -fs -zoom
I get fullscreen with a very smooth playback .
I don't think it would do the same with DVDs though.

So your PII 300MHz seems more than enough for playing DivX files :-)

BTW, you may be interested in a project of mine that makes use [of 
course!] of the
great mplayer package to produce a micro (~5MB) CD Linux distro able to 
autoboot
the CD and autoplay any audio/video file you stuff inside it. I already 
checked it
on the PII 266 I was talking about above and it plays smoothly, so it 
should work
with your one too.
You can find more info on this in
    http://movix.sf.net/

BTW^2, thanks again to Arpi and all the mplayer developers group for 
their great
great package!

Hope it helps,
 Roberto De Leo