[MPlayer-users] Option -benchmark: interpretation of results

[Björn Gerhart]

Dear members,

I want to check which system load the video playback of mplayer causes.
That's important, because video playback takes place in the background,
while at the same time the system acts as a kind of server.

Yet unfortunately, I only can use the "vesa" xorg driver and therefore
am using mplayer's video output "x11".

Here is a table of the benchmarks I got with 480p versus 720p with the
film "Big Buck Bunny" (24fps):

Resolution  VC      VO      A      Sys     Framedrop  Codec
 854x480    49,15%   3,62%  1,28%  45,95%  0%         theora
1280x720    38,26%  47,71%  1,71%  12,32%  2%         ffmpeg

Now I have problems with interpreting the values. When the resolution is
smaller, I would expect the system to take less load, which in fact is
not the case. In my tests, the higher resolution requires less system
load with a framedrop rate of 2% at the same time.

Could you please help me interpreting these values? Does the system load
maybe represent the "free" system capacities and not the used one?

The command line I called was:
mplayer -vo x11 -benchmark /path/to/video.file