[MPlayer-users] Your system is too SLOW to play this! ???

[Corey Hickey]

BogDan Vatra wrote:
> http://omnidatagrup.ro/~taipan/mkv/Sin.City.2005.1080p.HDTV.DTS.x264.Sample-ESiR.mkv
> 
> x2:~/Desktop# mplayer Sin.City.2005.1080p.HDTV.DTS.x264.Sample-ESiR.mkv
> MPlayer 1.0rc1-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
> CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ (Family: 15, Model:
> 43, Stepping: 1)

That doesn't surprise me. My machine can play the video, but it has a 
bit of trouble--video slightly lags behind the audio sometimes. A couple 
benchmarks I just found indicate that my slightly-overclocked Athlon64 
3400+ should outperform a 4200+ at single-threaded tasks.

Some things to consider.

* Libavcodec's (and, hence, MPlayer's) H.264 decoder is single-threaded, 
so having a dual-core processor doesn't help much.
* Decoding H.264 requires lots of processing power.
* Decoding (and displaying) high-resolution video requires lots of 
processing power.

Watch the "A-V:" section of MPlayer's status line; if the number is 
substantially higher than 0.000, then MPlayer can't decode the video 
quickly enough to keep up with the audio.

Search 'man mplayer' for the skiploopfilter option. Skipping the loop 
filter for some or all frames may make the video playable.

-Corey