Video playback problem solved

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 04:45:45PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:00:22AM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote
> 
> > Well sse matters to video decoding.  That's what many distributions
> > have optimized versions of mplayer and such.
> 
>   That doesn't provide full benefit, unless you optimize all the
> packages that mplayer depends on.  I ran "equery" (a Gentoo-specific
> tool) to list all dependancies of mplayer.  Here are the packages I have
> installed that mplayer depends on...
> 
> app-arch/bzip2-1.0.6-r3 
> sys-libs/zlib-1.2.5-r2 
> sys-libs/ncurses-5.9 
> virtual/libiconv-0 
> media-libs/win32codecs-20071007-r4 
> app-arch/unrar-4.0.7 
> dev-util/pkgconfig-0.26 
> virtual/opengl-7.0 
> media-libs/freetype-2.4.8 
> virtual/jpeg-0 
> dev-lang/yasm-1.1.0-r1 
> media-libs/libpng-1.5.6 
> media-libs/alsa-lib-1.0.24.1 
> virtual/ttf-fonts-1 
> media-libs/giflib-4.1.6-r2 
> dev-libs/libxslt-1.1.26-r2 
> media-libs/a52dec-0.7.4-r6 
> media-video/rtmpdump-2.3 
> x11-libs/libXext-1.3.0 
> media-libs/libvorbis-1.3.1 
> x11-proto/videoproto-2.3.1 
> x11-proto/xf86vidmodeproto-2.3.1 
> x11-proto/xf86dgaproto-2.1 
> x11-proto/xineramaproto-1.2.1 
> x11-proto/scrnsaverproto-1.2.1 
> media-libs/fontconfig-2.8.0-r1 
> media-libs/libass-0.9.13 
> dev-libs/fribidi-0.19.2-r1 
> media-sound/lame-3.98.4 
> media-libs/x264-0.0.20110426 
> media-libs/xvid-1.2.2-r2 
> media-libs/libmng-1.0.10-r1 
> media-sound/mpg123-1.13.2 
> x11-libs/libXxf86vm-1.1.1 
> x11-libs/libXxf86dga-1.1.2 
> x11-libs/libXv-1.0.6 
> media-libs/libtheora-1.1.1 
> x11-libs/libXvMC-1.0.6
> 
> ...and those are just the direct first level dependancies.  If I listed
> the dependancies for these packages, the output would get really ugly
> really fast.  I repeat, it isn't enough to merely optimize mplayer itself.
> 
> * mplayer video calls X, so you have to optimize all of X
> * mplayer audio calls alsa, so you have to optimize all of alsa
> * if you're playing streaming audio/video, it helps to optimize all the
>   networking code
> * the calls are, in many cases, handled by the kernel, so you have to
>   optimize the kernel
> * etc, etc.  Optimize the entire system, and be done with it.

I run a 64bit x86 system.  So of course everything is already sse
optimized in every distribution.

Since your CPU is 64bit capable, just do that.

Twice the registers gains you typically about 10% performance on
everything, so you probably would benefit from that on an older system
like that.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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