player performance

[PeterTheMaster]

i am trying to use an old computer (pentium III, 1GHz) for video watching.
my favorite combination MPC/ffdshow which seems to play almost everything is way to power hungry for this machine, videos only get displayed at 1 fps or something.
when i install divx player instead, videos are rendered flawlessly and only 50% of the cpu power ist used. the downside ist, that i can only play .avi files and only xvid or divx encoded stuff. the first ist more of the problem than the latter obviously.
does anyone know why the divx player performs so much better? is there another player out there which can match this speed but also plays ogg or matroska files?

[Winamp_Hater]

Try Zoom Player or VideoLan.

[Smile2]

nope...Zoom Player will just make thing worse, also for VLC, it can play everything, but I think its a sub par player for personal video watching.

MPC is fine, its one of the player I know that using low resources..if the setting is correct. on Output, use Overlay Mixer. and turn off any post processing filter on ffdshow. ffdshow is also one of the fast codec, but the filter is CPU hungry.

or simples solution is to use Mplayer, fastest Media Player available.

[PeterTheMaster]

by mplayer you mean mplayer.exe, windows media player 6.4?
also impossible on this computer. if i dont intentionally activate any post processing in ffdshow, there is none, right? or do i have to shut it off somewhere unobvious?
that overlay mixer you are talking about is a ffdshow option, right? or is there another one in mpc?

thanks for the input, any idea why divx player is so much faster?

[Sirber]

mplayer with frontend, with lots of codecs.

[Smile2]

Mplayer is http://mplayerhq.hu
its a very popular Media Player among *nix user. NOT Windows Media Player 6.4
on Windows you also can download MPUI, for the GUI side.

setting for overlay mixer is on MPC, under View -> Options -> Playback -> Output.

AFAIK, DivX player use much more CPU usage than MPC.

try to use newer build of ffdshow. you can get it here (http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/).

[nexx]

I use MPlayer for all my video needs and it runs fine on my HTPC (P3 800mhz).

MPUI (http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~mfie/index.php?software=mpui) is a great little interface and comes bundled with MPlayer (albeit a slightly older version)

[zilog jones]

i am trying to use an old computer (pentium III, 1GHz) for video watching.
my favorite combination MPC/ffdshow which seems to play almost everything is way to power hungry for this machine, videos only get displayed at 1 fps or something.
1fps!? that's not good -_-

I have a P3-933, also using MPC/ffdshow, and most videos play fine at full speed (with the exception of full-size Huffyuv, highest quality MJPEG and uncompressed stuff). What graphics card are you using though? Really lame old 4-8MB graphics cards can make things a lot worse. I use a GeForce 2 Ti (64MB) ;)

[dimzon]

try to use CrystalPlayer (free or pro)

[PeterTheMaster]

graphics card is old and cheap, this never was a gaming computer. you think this has a big influence although there is nothing 3D involved?

i tried mplayer, much slower than divxplayer, on my other machine even slower than mpc/ffdshow.

[dimzon]

graphics card is old and cheap, this never was a gaming computer. you think this has a big influence although there is nothing 3D involved?
Seems like your problem is slow video output! Try to play with CrystalPlayer Pro - there are multiple videooutput modes!

[zilog jones]

graphics card is old and cheap, this never was a gaming computer. you think this has a big influence although there is nothing 3D involved?

i tried mplayer, much slower than divxplayer, on my other machine even slower than mpc/ffdshow.

I upgraded from a stinky old 8MB ATI Rage Pro to the GeForce 2 Ti I have now, and it did generally improve things, including 2D graphics and video rendering. And it cost me only €25 2 years ago - these days you can get a GeForce 4 MX4000 for about €30 new, but that may be overkill for such a PC. I just hope you have an AGP port though :(

[PeterTheMaster]

8MB ATI Rage Pro i think this is just the card in this computer. and i think agp ports werent arount when this computer was new, but i will check this out. thanks for the hint, this might be a cheap way out of this.

[QQ]

I have to tell that I used to play movies on my old C450 cpu WITH post processing on without any problems! I used mp6.4, overlay mixer as output, had to force some output color space and some more tweaks, but it used play most of the high res movies with 0 glitches!

[zilog jones]

8MB ATI Rage Pro i think this is just the card in this computer. and i think agp ports werent arount when this computer was new, but i will check this out. thanks for the hint, this might be a cheap way out of this.
AGP ports have been around since Pentium II's! And my 5-year-old PIII PC has AGP 4X. Though it's still possible your PC doesn't have an AGP port - it's easy to notice though - the graphics card will be plugged into a slot different to all the others. If your graphics is on-board though (i.e. the VGA socket is on the motherboard), it's very likely you don't have AGP. PCI graphics cards tend to be significantly slower.

[mimungr]

If movies play fine through the DivX player, clearly the video card isn't the bottleneck.

[dimzon]

If movies play fine through the DivX player, clearly the video card isn't the bottleneck.
DivX player may use another colorspace and/or mode.

[PeterTheMaster]

mimungr, that seems logical. that the divx player plays videos fine with less than half cpu load shows that this computer is capable of doing such things. is there a way to find out, what colorspace/mode is used by the divx player?

my theory on this is, that divx player could have some kind of efficient build-in avi and mpeg 4 decoder and does not use dshow or such general filter interface, which is bound to sacrifice performance for gererality.

so mpc might be fast (what power does a player need anyway, its just a stupid frame), ffdshow might be fast, but the problem might be that a filter like ffdshow is used in the first place and data has to be passed to it and stuff (i dont really know how dshow filters work).

[QQ]

try forcing different output modes in ffdshow, mixed with different overlay settings (and use overlay mixer in mpc)

[PeterTheMaster]

could you be more specific? which output/overlay mode is supposed to be the fastest?

[Caroliano]

I never had problems in play ordinary stuff like xvid or divx in my Celeron 1.7GHz, almost the same as your pIII 1GHz. The consume with MPC and FFDShow rarely surpass 50% of my process power. I have an plain onboard video card also, wich means nothing. I never tweaked nothing to have this so I don't know what's the problem... might conflict...

Try to unistall the Divx player and all his stuff. See the CPU consumption when you the computer is working decoding a video and when it is "doing nothing".