[MPlayer-users] two trials/dvd replay much too slow

[Stephen Mollett]

On Wednesday 01 Jan 2003 15:20, Bohdan Horst wrote:
>> My Celeron 300 / Neomagic-2160 laptop can just about play DVD
>> content with heavy tweaking.
> with which tweaking ?
> my P3 500 / Neomagic 2360 doesn;t play DVD well :(

Hi,

I forget the exact settings but I basically recompiled several times with 
various compiler optimizations until I found the best [subjective] settings 
then turned off all nonessential postprocessing, scaling and suchlike. I was 
playing vobs directly from the hard drive (I don't have a DVD drive in the 
machine as it's a super-small Thinkpad 240). I also just had the X server 
running, and killed off everything else that the system could run without. I 
used the Xv driver; I've heard some people say it's actually slower than 
plain X11 but on a relatively CPU-starved system, it gives excellent results.

Not very practical, but I just thought it would be fun to try. The playback 
wasn't perfect (or even nearly perfect) but it was 'better than just 
watchable'. It's better, though, to rip the DVD to mpeg4/ogg if you've got 
time - that way the DVD decoding doesn't have to be done in real-time and the 
resolution etc. can be tailored to the normal capabilities of your system 
while leaving sufficient cycles to scale/filter it to your taste.

Sometime I shall have to do the 'best compiler settings' experiment (-O3 isn't 
always faster than -O2) again on a couple of different systems using the 
latest compiler and document the results.

Stephen