Make MPlayer play h264 video files faster on multicore machines
You can make MPlayer play h264-encoded video files a lot faster on multicore machines if you graft some libraries from the ffmpeg-mt project into the resulting mplayer binary. We need to recompile for this. First, use Subversion to download the code for MPlayer:
svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
Then the code for ff-mpeg
svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk ffmpeg-mt
Remove the old libavcodec, libavformat and libavutil code from MPlayer
rm -rf mplayer/libavcodec mplayer/libavformat mplayer/libavutil
…and merge in the new ones from ff-mpeg:
cp -a ffmpeg-mt/libavcodec ffmpeg-mt/libavformat ffmpeg-mt/libavutil mplayer/
compile everything
cd mplayer
./configure --disable-vdpau --disable-libdirac-lavc
nice make -j 4
Install the new mplayer-mt binary in your /usr/bin foder:
sudo install -m 755 mplayer /usr/bin/mplayer-mt
Now play your h264 files with the new binary mplayer-mt. Original idea here.
The ff-mpeg SVN URL is wrong.
The ff-mpeg SVN URL is the right one. I re-tested it and it works.
I like the idea of upgrading mplayers’ library, but I don’t really want my h264-encoded files to play any faster than they do. It would make the voices very chipmonky and it would be really hard to follow what was going on.
@bob: the idea of the tip was to make them run faster as in “smoother”. As in “without glitches” and not faster as in “with double the video/audio speed”.
lol @ bob
I would very much like to second the lol @ bob…
What is the difference between this and just enabling vdpau (if you have an nVidia video card)?
Can you do this and enable vdpau? What effect?
Ubuntu-users can add a PPA repository, see:
https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/testing
…to get mplayer-mt (by the guy who makes smplayer, a graphical frontend to mplayer)
Works really well even on the hyper-threaded Atom processor (netbooks).
Yeah the ffmpeg-mt url is not the good one. This is the good one: http://gitorious.org/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-mt
Just look at your svn commands, these are the same source urls, and only the directory to create locally is changed.