[MPlayer-users] playing movies on slow machines ...

[Stephen Mollett]

On Monday 29 December 2003 16:41, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> i'm using a quite slow machine (PII/400 w/ RivaTNT) for movie
> playback. For some VCDs it works quite well, but for DivX it
> is defitively too slow.

Hm, it ought to be quick enough. My laptop, with a Celeron (Mendocino) 300 
CPU, is just about OK for most MPEG4 (divx/xvid) streams with no special 
hacks or tweaks. I allow it to drop frames ("-framedrop") but this rarely 
happens in practice. B-frames can cause framedrop, and if the size goes above 
about 640x360 it can struggle, but otherwise it's perfectly good.

What vo device do you use? I use XV on my laptop. You might want to try using 
Vidix - there is a driver for nVidia chips which appears to support the 
RivaTNT. I've never used Vidix myself, though (there's no driver for the 
Neomagic chip in the laptop and my main PC has an MGA G400, so I use mga_vid) 
so I don't know how to set it up or use it.

Also, did you compile MPlayer yourself? If not, you may benefit from doing so 
as it will then be optimised specifically for a Pentium II processor. (At 
least if you've got GCC 3.x - the best you can do on GCC 2.x is a generic 
"i686" processor, based on the Pentium Pro, which may well be good enough 
anyway.)

HTH
Stephen