[MPlayer-users] IS SMP support for X264 decoding possible

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 06:13:59PM -0700, RC wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 22:27:12 +0400
> Vladimir Mosgalin <mosgalin at VM10124.spb.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Sure, but everyone buys new computer because it needs one. Not
> > everyone has computer right now, you know. And 366 mhz may be enough
> > for playing dvd, but not for other tasks. 
> 
> Your opinions and computer purchasing habits, are not shared by
> everyone on the planet.  Computers well-below 366MHz are perfectly
> usable for a great many tasks, and continue to be widely used.  

Thanks for backing me up on this.

> > Of course I don't think anyone would upgrade computer solely for
> > playing movies at better resolution - but there are a lot of reasons
> > for upgrading it.
> 
> There are a lot of reasons not to upgrade as well.  

Not the least of which is: if you make yourself into a spoiled brat
with an overpowered computer, you WILL WRITE POOR CODE that requires
the insane cpu speed and insane amounts of ram.

> > Try as you might, you won't have low requirements for 1080p or 1080i
> > video, unless of course you want to sacrifice all the quality..
> 
> MPlayer isn't just for people that want to play HD video...

You failed to understand the gamer kiddie mindset. Surely EVERYONE
wants higher resolution and framerate. Who cares if you need a whole
power plant to operate the machine and the cooling system for it?? IT
MUST BE FAST AT ALL COST LOL!!!111oneone!11!

> > Increasing ghz even futher on single-core cpus is stupid, pointless
> > and impossible, 
> 
> There are numerous ways to increase CPU performance, without increasing
> clock speed, or adding cores.

More importantly there is not any need to increase CPU speed for
normal tasks. Vladimir talked about most software authors not wanting
to "upgrade their apps" to use dual core and they very well shouldn't,
because computers were already a plenty fast for those apps 15 years
ago. If there is a purpose for multi-core or true SMP, it's limited
to:
- running multiple _independent_ processes simultaneously
- specialized intensely computational tasks like computational
  mathematics and science, cryptographic attacks, render farms, etc.
  -- tasks which are actually amenable to parallelization without
  sacrificing the simplicity of the code
Making joe-random-app multithreaded is just stupid. There's an
argument to be made that movie playing is such a specialized
application, but IMO there's a better argument to be made that you
shouldn't use codecs that get 10% better compression with 5x slower
performance...

Rich