[MPlayer-users] High CPU use with v0.90 GUI

[Steve Snyder]

The MPlayer v0.90 GUI seems to consume a lot of CPU above that of just 
plain MPlayer.

I'm running MPlayer v0.90 on a somewhat marginal machine.  My environment: 

CPU: K6-3/366MHz
RAM: 160MB
OS: RedHat Linux v9
XFree86 device driver: VESA

Because this machine is borderline unusable for playing video, I pay close 
attention to CPU use.  I noticed today that playing a video clip with 
mplayer causes 60% CPU use while the same clip played with gmplayer shows 
90% processor utilization.  (I repeated the comparison several times to 
ensure that caching did not play a part in the difference.)

That seems like a lot of overhead for controls that are not being actively 
used.  I mean, without user intervention, all the GUI is doing is 
scrolling the title, right?

I built the MPlayer on this machine (with GCC v3.2.2), and it correctly 
detected my processor's capabilities.  I am using the default skin on the 
GUI.  If it matters, my MPlayer output device is "-vo x11" as this gives 
the best performance in my environment.

I have no complaints about the video decode/display given the hardware 
I've got, but it sure would be nice not to have the MPlayer GUI impose 
such a high cost in processor use.

Thanks.