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

[Joonas Koivunen]

On Monday 29 December 2003 18:41, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> 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.
You've definetly got something wrong over there, I've watched most of movies 
that I've ever watched with PII/333 w/ RivaTNT Vanta. Only when the frame 
size exceeded 512x400+ and there was somewhat high bitrate (>1000kbps) I had 
slowdowns... 

Otherwise I was able to keep dcgui (dc++ client) running in the background 
with a lot of connections :) Though, all other processes than X and mplayer 
had to be niced to 19, and X & mplayer up to -19. NOTE that this might not be 
good thing to do with a recent linux >2.6.0, but possibly by renicing the 
kernel threads higher than mplayer & X it might work...

Either way, renicing is the way to go :)

> Is there any possibility to prepare the movies, so that they require
> less CPU power (i.e. convert to an faster encoding) ? Its okay if
> the machine has some hours to do w/ the conversion, but then the
> playback should be okay.
Yes, mencoder could do the job, but I don't you'll need, after you learn to 
use "nice" and "renice" commands.

> It would be nice if you could give me a short command line for
> an avi file and a mpeg-pes stream.
rtfm

> regards,
-rzei