[MPlayer-users] Re: Can't play DV but can play mpeg2(DVD). Is this expected behavior

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 02:09:10AM -0500, Michael Waters wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 13:37 +1300, Phil Bertram wrote:
> > I have a 850mhz Duron, 384mb ram, S3 Trio 3D/2X 8mb AGP card. (hdparm -tT 
> > reports 18mb/s)
> > 
> > I can not play DV without significant framedropping. (used win32 codecs as 
> > well as ffmpegs).
> > However if I encode the same footage to mpeg2 using mjpegtools it will play 
> > well. (No scaling, just deinterlacing).
> > 
> > Is this normal ?
> > 
> > I imagine that the decoding of the mpeg2 would be more CPU intensive than DV.
> 
> I don't know the technical reasons but DV takes a lot more power to play
> than dvd on my machine as well.  On an athlon xp 2800 (2088 mhz) with
> matrox g400 using xmga, playing a 720x480 ntsc dv file with qdv, ffdv,
> or libdv, cpu usage hovers just under 30% according to gkrellm.  Playing
> a 1.33:1 dvd, cpu usage is sporadic and under 15%.

DV has horrible compression, and therefore it's also slow. The main
factors in decoding, from my experience, are cache thrashing and
bitstream parsing, and these both go way up at very high bitrates.

Rich