[MPlayer-users] One second of black screen before each instance of Mplayer

[Goodidea - Mplayer]

Hello,

I'm currently working on a project.

I need to play a loop of different MPG files.
These files and their order can be changed at anytime, which is why I'm 
not using he playlist feature of mplayer.

I then coded a scheduler and a player, the scheduler would set a 
filename in a shared memory and the player would read it whenever the 
current video was played.

I've test
Here is a short description of the hardware  (changing it is not an 
option) :
Asus Pundit 2800
Celeron 2.4GHz
256 Mb RAM
ATI radeon 9100 IGP

The first idea was to run it on X using the radeon driver.
Result was OK but we would get a CPU load way too high :
   X was taking about 50% of the CPU
   mplayer was taking 40% of the CPU
it didn't leave much CPU for the other tasks and the playing video was 
suffeing from non-fluidity.
Even though the result wasn't too bad, each time we started the video, 
it took about 0.4s of a black screen before it actually started playing



The second try was to compile the kernel with framebuffer and to 
redirect mplayer directly on the fb device without even running X
Great, the CPU usage has suddenly gone under the 30% now... but now, 
mplayer displays ablack screen during one second before playing the 
actual content of the movie.


The third try was to use X with the vesa driver and mplayer redirected 
directly on vesa. The CPU usage is the around the 35% (used by mplayer, 
X being as good as inactive)... but, the delay before each video is also 
a big second before it starts displaying anything.


The files I'm trying to play are all MPG files 800x600 and I must admit 
I'm using the zoom and fullscreen options.

the rest of the setup is not exotic at all ; kernel 2.6.9, debian woody 
stable, compiled mplayer with no fancy options.

the problem is that this device is supposed to become a video jukebox 
for a hair salon; and in this context one second is very unacceptable 
(according to them, of course ;) )

My question is actually :
- is there anything I can do to optimize the behaviour of mplayer (even 
though I've read the doc about every single option of mplayer) ?
- could another file encoding help  ?
- isn't there anyway to "concat" video files on-the-fly ... something 
like a pipe redirecting to mplayer and that I would feed with the video 
contents. this one second delay would then only occur for the first file 
played (which would be OK)
- anything which could help would be welcome , even wild guesses.
- what is actually the resason of this delay (I've tried on a faster 
machine, the delay is smaller, but it's there)
 - I've made tests with playlists , it doesn't help, mplayer re-inits 
the display for every file
  - I've also made tests with a bash script running sequential versions 
of mplayer, doesn't help either


One last thing, I wanted to thank every single person which has 
contributed to this wonderful piece of software... This is software "as 
it shoul be", transparent, efficient, flexible... great job.

I'd really hate to  switch to another player than mplayer but if I don't 
find a way to solve my problem, I may have to think about it, has anyone 
any (good) experience with another player.

Thanks for your help
Sébastien