Wich options makes playing less CPU hungry?

[patxitron]

Hi to all.

I'm about to encode a 1280x720 25fps progressive clip using Xvid and trying to play it in a Athlon XP1800+ CPU. I'm unable to get it playing smoothly, it drops a lot of frames. However, several months ago I downloaded from Pioneer website a Xvid demo clip with the same resolution and framerate that plays smoothly in the same machine.

My encode has no B-frames, no GMC, no quarter-pixel and no trellis options enabled. Wich other options can make my clip less CPU hungry when playing?

Thank you for your answers.

Best regards.

[stephanV]

Not many i think, if at all... you could try using ffdshow for decoding or maybe mplayer...

are you sure your CPU is the bottleneck?

[Sharktooth]

trellis does not interfere with decoding complexity, so you can enable it without problems.
Ensure you disabled all postprocessing coz there's not so much you can do on the encoder side to make it less complex to decode...
Try using h.263 instead of mpeg or custom matrices and use VBV to limit the bitrate peaks.

[IgorC]

maybe videolan will help.

[Mnl]

Like StephanV said: Are you sure it is your cpu that is the bottleneck? If you have a rather old graphics card it may also be the cause. I had to change my old faithful riva tnt2 32 mb ram card a while ago because it weren’t able to play back HD encodes. (I don’t game much :D )

If your graphics card is an onboard graphics card or if it has less than 64 mb of ram it is likely that it is not able to handle encodes with a horisontal resolution of 1280 pixels.

[patxitron]

Ensure you disabled all postprocessing coz there's not so much you can do on the encoder side to make it less complex to decode...
Try using h.263 instead of mpeg or custom matrices and use VBV to limit the bitrate peaks.

Ok, I forgot to mention that I used your EQM V2UHR matrix. I take note about matrices, and VBV when encoding and ffmpeg/postprocessing when playing.

maybe videolan will help.
I tryed to play it with videolan and with mplayer with equal results.

Thank you very much

Best regards

EDIT: @Mnl the graphic card is an ATI Radeon 8500 with 64Mb (built by ATI)

EDIT2: The original 1080i transport stream that my clip comes from, also plays almost smoothly in the same machine.

[Mnl]

EDIT: @Mnl the graphic card is an ATI Radeon 8500 with 64Mb (built by ATI).



OK, that pretty much rules out your graphics card then.

[Teegedeck]

UHR is definitely too much. Better try H.263.

[HalfHuman]

could you give us a little bit more details about your system. i believe processing power is not the problem (i mean the processor). and between us: R8500 is a rather old graphics card.
expecting details...

[patxitron]

Athlon XP1800+ with 512MB DDR266 in a Elitegroup SiS based mainboard fitted with a Tekram DC390U2W Ultrawide SCSI, one 80GB ATA100 hard disk, one 17GB ultra fast and wide SCSI disk, one 8x SCSI DVD-ROM and one Tashiba IDE 2x DVD-R burner.

The SCSI items are legacy from an older computer from my brother.

Best regards.

EDIT: I forgot the Terratec 5.1 soundcard (I don't remember the exact model and this computer is not at home).

[bugmenotwillyou]

maybe videolan will help.

VideoLan uses a lot less cpu.

media player was using 33-40% cpu while vlc uses only 11%

[edurm]

While playing the movie enter you TASK MANAGER and check how much MPlayer or VLC.exe is taking from the CPU


if it's not near 75% - probably there’s something else holding the playback



Advice - try to install sis-agp proprietary AGP drives instead Windows drives, you can get it from www.sis.com.tw or just sis.com - sis chipsets can boost up to 30% whit this tweak ;)

[patxitron]

In task manager CPU is 100% with both mplayer and videolan. Thanks for the AGP info, I will try it soon.

[MacAddict]

Hate to sound so out of touch but does the video card make that much of difference to video playback performance? Guess I never realized that the video is actually utilizing some of the RAM on the card either.