[MPlayer-users] Playing QHD (3840x2160) material with mplayer

[Corey Hickey]

Dean S. Messing wrote:
> On Apr 11, 2008, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
>> You could try using -vo gl:yuv=X with various X values or -vo xvidix (see
>> man mplayer), but there are other limiting factors as well.
> 
> and
> 
> On 11 Apr 2008, Reimar Doeffinger wrote:
>> At this resolution, I think at best some really new cards will be able
>> to handle it via -vo gl, probably only -vo gl2 will work. And it
>> certainly should not be that much faster that x11.
> 
> I finally got a few minutes to try both of your suggestions.
> None come close to playing QHD at 24 fps. There were certainly
> speed differences between -vo gl:yuv=X for X==0 compared to the
> other values (which were all faster) but all are slower
> that -vo x11.
> 
> I am baffled by two things:
> 
> 1)    As mplayer sucks the video off of disk the first time around
>       I would expect to see the glrellm memory meter (Fedora 6) increase,
>       but I don't.  Once the disk activity drops to zero mplayer speeds up
>       form 2 or 3 fps to ~14, so it is clearly playing from memory.
>       The meter shows that I'm using maybe 15% of the memory before
>       calling mplayer.  The clip is 2.4GB long and i have 4GB of memory
>       so the meter should move.  But it doesn't.

Are you just playing from disk a few times and letting the kernel cache
the file in memory? If so, then gkrellm isn't showing you the memory
usage of the kernel's cache, which always grows to eat all otherwise
unused RAM anyway.

> 2)    It turns out I _can_ play a few frames at 24 fps or faster
>       using `animate' from ImageMagick.  The problem is that ImageMagick
>       is a memory pig: a single QHD frame is 24.8MB but it eats more
>       than 5 times that amount w/in ImageMagick.

What does "mplayer mf://*.png -mf fps=24" do? If your original source is
a pile of png files, that will be less I/O load than an uncompressed
video; I don't know if it would be faster.

-Corey