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ffmpeg-mt

post #1 of 6
4/3/12 at 5:48pm
Thread Starter 
Since i am trying to get better performance out of my old HTPC, i was reading about using multi-threaded ffmpeg decoder. I cannot seem to tell if its active on my system, and even if it is, does mt mean multi thread only, on 1 core, or multi thread on multiple cores?
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post #2 of 6
4/3/12 at 9:15pm
According to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html, multithreaded support was added to main mplayer last year sometime, but you need to enable it with a command line option, something like:

mplayer -lavdopts threads=N file.mkv

However, since you have a single core P4, I don't think you will get any performance boost. If you run top (or look in system monitor) while playing a 1080p video that you're having problems with, you'll probably see that you're at 100% CPU utilization. Multithreaded in this case would only help if one core was at 100% and another core was sitting there idle.

Another option, since you have a P4 I assume you don't have PCI-express slots. There are some old nVidia PCI cards that support VDPAU (I think it's the 8400 GS), which could probably be obtained on ebay pretty cheap.
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post #3 of 6
4/5/12 at 9:39am
Quote:
Originally Posted by k_ross View Post

Another option, since you have a P4 I assume you don't have PCI-express slots. There are some old nVidia PCI cards that support VDPAU (I think it's the 8400 GS), which could probably be obtained on ebay pretty cheap.

I believe all VDPAU cards are PCI-E only.
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post #4 of 6
4/5/12 at 10:35am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by k_ross View Post

According to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html, multithreaded support was added to main mplayer last year sometime, but you need to enable it with a command line option, something like:

mplayer -lavdopts threads=N file.mkv

However, since you have a single core P4, I don't think you will get any performance boost. If you run top (or look in system monitor) while playing a 1080p video that you're having problems with, you'll probably see that you're at 100% CPU utilization. Multithreaded in this case would only help if one core was at 100% and another core was sitting there idle.

Another option, since you have a P4 I assume you don't have PCI-express slots. There are some old nVidia PCI cards that support VDPAU (I think it's the 8400 GS), which could probably be obtained on ebay pretty cheap.

Ive tried th lavdopts threads and it didnt seem to make much difference. What i think makes a huge difference is the output method. I am having some great success playing 1080i mpeg2 ts from my cable unencrypted QAM256 using MythTV, ffmpeg & XVideo, however in mplayer the same options do not work well. Id imagine there is a configuration file somewhere that shows how myth tv is doing it vs how mplayer is... but i dont know where that would be
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post #5 of 6
4/5/12 at 3:06pm
In MythTV you're probably using the "One Field" deinterlace option. You can do the same in mplayer with the "-vf field" option. This will reduce CPU load quite a bit on interlaced content.
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post #6 of 6
4/5/12 at 5:36pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by bac522 View Post

I believe all VDPAU cards are PCI-E only.

There are PCI VDPAU capable cards (or at least there used to be, I don't know if they are sold anymore). The problem with them is that if you aren't using VDPAU you probably won't be able to playback HD clips due to PCI bandwidth limitations. I looked into these a while back...
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