[MPlayer-users] How can I force mplayer to drop frames more consistently?

[Phil Rhodes]

> >> Standard high-quality film has a 24 fps rate.

There are many stories about how this rate choice came to pass, many of them probably apocryphal. What's certainly true is that in the early days of non-sound cinema, film was routinely projected at rates other (often higher) than the taking rate, probably so a movie theater could schedule more performances and make more money.

Modern film crews are well aware of the limited temporal resolution of the medium and camera moves are usually planned to accomodate good results.

The biggest problem with this is that many displays now support only 60fps, creating a combination of taking rate and display rate which can produce really horrible results, especially if any sort of frame rate modification has been introduced to the material during postproduction. I have repeatedly lobbied for an option for computer movie players to sync their output to the display device as opposed to the audio device, to avoid unpleasant picture stammering.

P