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View Full Version : Linux, Windows & MP4 playback CPU load

ppera2
2nd October 2002, 10:32
I recently installed Linux Mandrake 9 RC2, and it has good media player xine. It plays almost all possible formats and codecs.

What surprised me is very low CPU usage when play DivX. First moment I thought that CPU usage meter is incorrect, but at DVD playback it shows real values about 40-45%. So, CPU load by playback is about average 3-5 % only. It goes for moments up to 8% when play DivX 5 with B frames.
In Win I have 30-45 % with ffdshow and more with DivX 5.02 codec.
There is no postprocessing (as I see) for now in xine, so I meusured without it in Win, however as I see it has no much influence to CPU load by me.
System is KT266A board with 256 MB, Athlon 1200 underclocked to 1066 MHz currently.
Very interesting, and I wait Win portal of xine...
TactX
6th October 2002, 22:36
It is propably not xine that is that fast, as I got about the same results with mplayer. The decoding is in both cases done by libavcodec (FFmpeg) which does a quite good job in both decoding and encoding MPEG-4 :D
ppera2
6th October 2002, 23:18
I tried later Mplayer too. It has about 20% CPU load, but picture quality is much better than with xine.
Anyway, ffdshow use libavdodec too, but CPU load is still much lower in Linux.
TactX
6th October 2002, 23:29
Originally posted by ppera2
Anyway, ffdshow use libavdodec too, but CPU load is still much lower in Linux.

This is what I wanted to say...

Well, propably another reason for starting a linux forum :D
mean
7th October 2002, 07:29
If i remember correctly, part of the CPU load used for displaying (X11 stuff) is not taken into accound in the process CPU time but in X11 process.

So the real value may be a bit higher.
Neo Neko
7th October 2002, 23:36
Originally posted by mean
If i remember correctly, part of the CPU load used for displaying (X11 stuff) is not taken into accound in the process CPU time but in X11 process.

So the real value may be a bit higher.

Full rez Divx5(bells and whistles included) play smoother on my PII 400 under Linux than Windows with no filtering. So whatever CPU time is being neglected Linux still does it with less. Well not really Linux but well you know. :D

On the subject of Mplayer. Has anyone found any good Mandrake 9 compatable RPM binary packages? I don't have the time to compile ATM and the best I have come up with is 7.2.
ppera2
8th October 2002, 00:23
Originally posted by Neo Neko


On the subject of Mplayer. Has anyone found any good Mandrake 9 compatable RPM binary packages? I don't have the time to compile ATM and the best I have come up with is 7.2.

I have same Linux too. Found rpm packages here: http://mirrors.sctpc.com/dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/ .
You will need perhaps couple library too - libpng 1 or 2 as I remember.
mean
8th October 2002, 18:29
Originally posted by Neo Neko

So whatever CPU time is being neglected Linux still does it with less.


Never sais otherwise, but since the topic was about comparing CPU load .....
Moreover the CPU used by X11 can vary much depending on the video card
(and its driver)

Originally posted by Neo Neko
[B]
On the subject of Mplayer. Has anyone found any good Mandrake 9 compatable RPM binary packages? I don't have the time to compile ATM and
the best I have come up with is 7.2.

You might also want to try http://plf.zarb.org
There' s plenty of good stuff there.