[MPlayer-users] How to choose fastest drivers

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 07:23:15PM -0700, JD wrote:
>  On 10/30/2010 07:10 PM, Nick Koretsky wrote:
> >On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 15:42:55 -0700
> >  JD<jd1008 at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >
> >>My system is a 2.4GHz Athlon64, Fedora 13 (i686),
> >>2GB ram, 8GB swap. Before I start the mplayer,
> >>the load factor is relatively very low:
> >>load average: 1.56, 1.50, 1.43
> >This is insanely high LA for an idle system. idle system should be
> >below 0.1, anything above this means that either system is not idle or
> >something is fundamentally wrong with drivers.
> Which really makes me wonder! How could that load
> average be at 1.56 when the total %cpu usage is less
> than 7% for all processes in the system (prior to running mplayer).

Which of the CPU usage numbers did you look at?
Either way, on Linux load includes IO-load.
But a load of 1.56 means that less than half a CPU is idle.

> >>$ mplayer -vo x11 -ao  sdl -nocache  test-vid.mkv
> >You should never user -vo x11 other than for testing purposes. Use xv
> >or gl_nosw (or vdpau if videocard is nvidia)
> My video card is the ancient ATI Radeon Mobile 9600 m10.

OpenGL (-vo gl_nosw) should work just fine with that, actually I think
it will even work fine with then opensource drivers.

> Problem is I do not experience this terribly out of sync audio
> with other videos files. The audio seems to be way ahead of the
> video.

Though this sounds like an actual CPU load issue, unless it is the PCI/AGP
bus or something that is overloaded and it can't get the data to the
graphics card.