Thorsten Pferdek�mper wrote:
Hi,I had a runin with this too, and also I prioritized mencoder. the reason is simply that lowest nice value gets preemptive precedence over the other application and mencoder requires cputime every frame you record. If mplayer has lowest nice value, mencoder will buffer some frames and encode when cputime is available, however these buffers can only hold so much.
whenever I watch a video while my freevo box is recording something, the video appears rather choppy. This would be ok for me if top told me that there is no idle time left, but there is about 20% idle all the time. I also can not really imagine that the disk is the problem. It does not change at all when I give the mplayer command a -cache 100000.
So I have played around with my BIOS settings. Perhaps it is a little bit better now after optimizing some timing settings, but it stays being a little bit choppy.
I have also played around with the nice values for mplayer and mencoder. I have mencoder with nice -12 and mplayer with -5. I have also tried to give mplayer a lower nice that mencoder. This way, watching the videos were not choppy any more, but I had some frame drops sometimes. So I kept mencoder with the lower nice, because it is more important for me to have nice recordings.
So, does anyone have an idea how to make mplayer use my systems ressources? Alternatively: How can I check where the bottleneck is?
Regards,
Thorsten
The only sollution I've found is a compromise and give both applications a farily low nice value. I used -10 for a period, however you should be confident that you have sufficient resources (i.e. at least 20% spare cpu time when recording/playing) and accept that although better, sometimes frames will drop anyway (so dont use mplayer while recording anything important... )
oh.. and last sollution would be to get an ivtv based capture card. since they do encoding in hardware, the cpu is left largly untouched... (1-2% on my 700Mhz Athlon recording 720x576 mpeg2.. )
My $0.02 - Styx
-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games.
Get your fingers limbered up and give it your best shot. 4 great events, 4
opportunities to win big! Highest score wins.NEC IT Guy Games. Play to
win an NEC 61 plasma display. Visit http://www.necitguy.com/?r _______________________________________________
Freevo-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
