Does anybody know Fastest player/decoder/filter?

[junglemike]

Hi people!
I was wondering if any of you guys know fastest player, decoder and/or filter to play mpeg-4 content (mostly Xvid).
I'm using my laptop to watch movies in spare time. The laptop is very old, it is P-II- 266mhz, 128mb ram, windows2000, 2mb video ram.
The best i found till now - is ffdshow filter and bsplayer as a player. This way i can watch most of the movies, but i still cannot watch movies with large resolution , like 640x4xx, cpu is unable to keep up play video so it looses synchronization in secounds (cpu is 100% busy), I've alredy killed any unused processes, and made player to bi high priority, but i'm still unable to play such movies with large resolutions.
So maybe someone know any other fast player , filter , or decoder.
Please tell me your opinion

[aketon]

No, there isn't! Ffdshow is the fastest decoder available! In resolutions like 640x460 sometimes even my P3 700mhz can't decode correctly!

(I believe is time to buy a new laptop if you want to watch videos without problems!):rolleyes:

[*.mp4 guy]

The only way to get higher resolution play back on a slow machine is to...

1.reduce or eliminate b-vops
2.no qpel
3.no post processing
4.use mp3 instead of vorbis or aac to reduce overhead.
5.enable overlay mode.

thats all you can do, since your already using a good player and decoder.

[edit]: all the same mpeg2 may be your only option.

[sysKin]

If you want to use XviD, use 1.1 branch, it's already much faster at decoding (nothing close to libavcodec though).

Also, if everything goes well, XviD will drop b-frames when lagging behind. You just have to wait some more for that...

Radek

[junglemike]

Well, qpel, b-frames are parameters of encoding, iirc, so i can't change anything on decoding stage. I'm alredy doing no pp.
About overlay - there's something strange. If i try to open these large movies - I get some kind of error from bsplayer that "Overlay Fail" and then another error: " Display hardware is not capable of color space conversions, switching to RGB" And then it moves really slow, like a slideshow. With smaller movies i don't have this error and they run fine (mostly). Maybe anyone have a clue why is this?
@Syskin , dropping b-frame sounds good, I also have a palm (zire71), it's precessor is even slower (144mhz arm cpu) There's a player for palmOS that can skip b-frames if it can't keep up decoding the stream. Something like this culd be a good solutio for me i think. How do i do this? And what is 1.1 branch? (i'm sorry, i'm not so experienced in these things).
Another question, if you don't mind: The only way i found to swich to another decoder - is to unistall the current. So, to try xvid, i had to unistall ffdshow, and to try divx i had to unistall both xvid and ffdhow and (after i say divx is no good for me) i had to reinstall everything again. Isn't there a easier way? Like i choose what player to use?
Thanks for your replies.

[Leak]

Originally posted by junglemike
Another question, if you don't mind: The only way i found to swich to another decoder - is to unistall the current. So, to try xvid, i had to unistall ffdshow, and to try divx i had to unistall both xvid and ffdhow and (after i say divx is no good for me) i had to reinstall everything again. Isn't there a easier way? Like i choose what player to use?

Dunno about DivX (I never install it in the first place), but with ffdshow you can just go to the Codecs page and set XviD to "disabled" and it'll get decoded by the XviD directshow decoder, or you can set it to "XviD 1" and ffdshow will use the installed xvidcore.dll for decoding, or you can select "libavcodec" and use that. Doesn't get much easier to switch. :)

np: Telefon Tel Aviv - Bubble And Spike (Map Of What Is Effortless)

[Perplx]

The fastest xvid player is prolly videolan (http://www.videolan.org/) or mplayer (http://ftp3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta/) because they arnt dependent on dshow they seem to use a 1-3% less cpu then ffdshow on my computer. You might get better performance out of a bootable linux player like GeeXbox (http://www.geexbox.org/en/requirements.html) or Movix (http://movix.sourceforge.net/) because they stripped out everything you dont need to play a video.

[junglemike]

Thanks for the precious info guys, I will try this. Actually i am using Linux and very satisfied with it (never crash, can work with old hardware) But i didnt' know such things exist.
Thanks again

[junglemike]

WOW, I've tried Mplayer and i must say that i'm really impressed.
It uses barely half cpu than my previous configuration(bsplay+ffdshow)
On most movies i have less than 50% cpu usage!!!
Even movie with largest resolution 720x576 plays fine (85% cpu).
I was so overwhelmed and tried Mplayer on 2 additional computers (destkps).
On my "best" computer - celeron 1700mhz Mplayer uses ~ 8% cpu, FF used ~22%. I also have very old pc in another room - Pentium I - 166 mhz (overclocked to 200mhz) 32mb ram, windows 95. I did never thought that such computer can play mpeg-4. It really does play most of the movies (still, except those with large res)
And this all is taking into consideration that mplayer writes me smth that it is not optimized for my processor and i need to recompile.
I've also tried to check whether it is compatible with different a/v formats (divx/xvid/mpeg1/ mp3/ac3) - Didn't find any problems - all files played fine.
From now on, i will recommend this player to anybody with slow pc.

[hellfred]

Originally posted by junglemike

And this all is taking into consideration that mplayer writes me smth that it is not optimized for my processor and i need to recompile.
I've also tried to check whether it is compatible with different a/v formats (divx/xvid/mpeg1/ mp3/ac3) - Didn't find any problems - all files played fine.
From now on, i will recommend this player to anybody with slow pc.
If you are using a precompiled version of mplayer, it will most likely be compiled with runtime CPU detection, menas mplayer examines what Singel Instruction Muliple Data (SIMD)features your CPU is capable of (MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow etc.) and use routines using the SIMD features your CPU provides. I assume that you have mplayer running on a linux OS - at least for me mplayer only outperformes dshow players clearly on linux, not on win32. Then compiling mplayer for your system will give you a little bit better performance. But the improvement will not be so significant that it is worth the effort of building you own movix bootcd. But if you have a linux already installed, just go ahead.
MPlayer tarballs come with a README that help you getting started in compiling. ./configure --help is very usefull, too.

Hellfred

EDIT: ./configure --help , not --hell, thouth sometimes it can be quiete hard to get configure script to find and enable all features installed in different places on the msys and cygwin environments.

[dimzon]

Look at my signature :)

[junglemike]

Thanks for the info. Gspot mentioned in your thread is really handy thing.
Crystal player looks nice. Especially iliked it's OSD. But it may fit for my desktop pc- Celeron 1700/368mb ram.
But my poor laptop cannot handle it. From compairing Crystal player to mplayer - Crystal uses about 2 times more cpu recources, and take about 6 times more ram.