On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Kent Fredric<kentfred...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Douglas Royds <douglas.ro...@tait.co.nz> > wrote: >> >> Oops. Those numbers were a bit adrift. Here is mplayer playing miniDV: >> >> mplr 60% >> Xorg 22% >> pulse 10% >> >> Eventually it settled down to the 45/45 that I showed below, which might >> have more to do with kernel load-sharing than anything, though I don't know >> what X was up to. >> >> For the comparison, totem (gstreamer) playing the same DV: >> >> totem 45-57% >> xorg 10-16% >> pulse 2-15% >> >> For some reason, mplayer is slightly more demanding on X, and >> substantially less efficient at decoding DV than gstreamer is, and it's >> tipping my elderly laptop over the edge. >> >> No video editing for me. > > > try various alternative -vo options, x11 xv, xover, gl, or even vdpau if > you have a supporting video card.
The fundamental difficulty in saying anything about Douglas' stats is that we are not told what resolution or bitrate you are playing. dv-avi is an format where each frame is individually compressed, rather than something like mpeg where many frames only contain information on the "difference" between the previous frame and the current frame. This makes frame accurate editing easier, as each frame is present in the stream without needing to reference any preceding frames. Firewire DV video cameras commonly used this format/codec. dv-avi files are therefore very large by comparison to mpeg files. Are you experiencing a bandwidth problem with your hard drive? How is the wa(it) figure looking in top when you are playing dv-avi?
