Any mplayer optimization ideas?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 08:21:06PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   Is anyone aware of any magical tricks for speeding up mplayer, or do I
> finally have to give in and replace my 1999 Dell 450 mhz PIII with a
> faster machine?  I was checking out some internet TV stations on
> http://wwitv.com and mplayer simply can not keep up with a 45 or 100
> kbit feed.  I've done all the optimizations I can think of...
>   - running X at 16bpp with BlackBox as the WM
>   - running Gentoo linux with tweaked compile flags, namely...
>     CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse"
>   - sse and mmx are also in my USE flags
> 
>   Here's the start of the mplayer diagnostics when I connect to an
> Argentinian site...
> 
> bash-2.05b$ mplayer -playlist http://wwitv.com/_tv/6990b.asx
> MPlayer 1.0pre6-3.3.5-20050130 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team
> CPU: Intel Pentium III Katmai/Pentium III Xeon Tanner (Family: 6, Stepping: 3)
> Detected cache-line size is 32 bytes
> MMX2 supported but disabled
> CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 0 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
> Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX SSE
> 
>   I don't see mmx2 anywhere in /proc/cpuinfo.

I think mmx2 still shows as mmx, but on newer procesor models it had a
few more instructions.  mmx has almost never done anything useful so for
the most part no one cares.  sse has at least been useful.

You can check the configure for mplayer and see if it has a -mmx2 option
you could turn on.  Hopefully it knows to pick the best option.

For performance, the biggest thing is to have a video card that supports
using xv (X video extension) and does YUV decoding in hardware.  That
probably uses about half the cpu if not more on your system when playing
video.  I know using a matrox G200 on a P2 400 I could play divx no
problem when using xv or better yet the mga_vid driver which used YUV
and scaling in hardware, while if I used x11 direct playback, I couldn't
even play a DVD mpeg2 file.

Lennart Sorensen
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