[MPlayer-users] Encoding starts fast, then slows down

[Corey Hickey]

Wendy Tromp wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> 
> 
>>ah its' a laptop? then it may be the speedstep (cpu is slown down
>>when it gets hot) thingie
>>
> 
> 
> I heard about speedstep before, but I have never been able to find it, can
> you tell me how I can disable it (provided that I have it)?
> But then again, I don't believe that when the problem is temperature, only a
> reboot can solve it, and idle time can't. I have tried leaving it idle a
> while and then start over, which was no use.....
> 
> Wendy Tromp
> 

Perhaps it's a fault of your DVD drive. If you have some space on your
hard drive, you can test this easily and definitively.

1. Open two terminals, and cd to a directory you can create a huge file
in.

2. In one terminal, run this:
while true ; do du -sh stream.dump ; sleep 10 ; done
(it'll complain about "No such file.." - that's ok)

3. Run "mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream" in the other terminal.

4. Now, watch the values du is spitting out in the other terminal. By
subtracting the sizes of two consecutive values and dividing by 10, you
can get a fairly accurate measure of how fast your drive is reading the
DVD, in MB (or KB) per second.

If this number slows way down after a little while, then you know
that the DVD reading is the bottleneck. For reference, my 16x drive
seems to read at about 5.3 MB per second from the beginning of a DVD.
If you think yours ought to be faster, check to see if DMA is enabled.

-Corey