SMPlayer

[toiday]

I was using SMPlayer on a PC with Core 2 Duo CPU. Looking at Windows Task Manager->Performance, I noted while 1 core is at 98% and the other core is only at 5%. My playback is somewhat jerking, not as smooth as it should be. I don't believe my SMplayer is setup for duo core. I there a way to setup SMplayer to use multiple CPU?

[kurt]

maybe try the mpui/smplayer package from Lord Moulder. It offers during installation a core 2 duo optimized build of mplayer.

but even the optimized build doesn't use both cores on my core duo equally...

[toiday]

I don't know much about H264 but I believe both format are H262. I can play TS on both SMplayer and PowerDVD7. MKV will not plays on PowerDVD. Also, when I play the TS file, it give smooth picture. Not so for the MKV format, it's somewhat jerking. What's the different between the format?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I don't know much about H264 but I believe both format are H262. I can play TS on both SMplayer and PowerDVD7. MKV will not plays on PowerDVD. Also, when I play the TS file, it give smooth picture. Not so for the MKV format, it's somewhat jerking. What's the different between the format?

It's a known limitation that the "libavcodec" decoders (ffmpeg/mplayer) are not very optimized for multi-threading yet. The container (MKV, MP4, AVI, etc.) shouldn't make any difference for playback performance at all. It's the (video-)format (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, etc.) that matters! And of course the decoder used for the specific formats can make a huge difference. If the format is very complex, like H.264 for example, the video will need a lot of CPU power for playback. A good/optimized decoder requires less CPU time (compared to an un-optimized decoder) and/or is able to split the calculations on multiple cores. Also note: The higher the framerate/resolution, the higher the CPU usage.

I don't know what engine PowerDVD7 uses for splitting/decoding the video files. So I guess PowerDVD uses DirectShow, prefers it's own (internal) decoders and falls back to third-party filters if necessary. So maybe you can get PowerDVD to play MKV files by installing the "Haali Media Splitter" ...

[rvm]

For H.264 videos maybe a way to improve performance is to use the CoreAVC codec (explained here (http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1021553&postcount=285)).

My processor is single core, so I don't really notice any difference.