I recently encoded a movie of mine that was 29 frames per second with an aspect ratio of 4:3 (1.33:1) at a resolution of 640x480 and a bitrate of 900kbps. When I playback the file on my 800MHz AMD Athlon computer I only can get at a max 25 fps playback on that movie. Shouldn't my 800MHz be able to handle that movie? My 800MHz can playback movies with a frame rate of 23 fps just fine. The thing I'm guessing is causing the slowdown is the resolution of the movie. Is that the problem? I just assumed that my 800MHz could decode that and I'm wondering what the problem is. By the way, if it matters I have an ATI Radeon 7500 video card (with latest drivers), 512MB RAM, and am using BSplayer but also tried Windows Media Player.

I think it can safely be said that your CPU doesn't have enough number crunching power to decode high-resolution MPEG-4.

You might want to try either 3ivx or XviD decoder since IIRC they have the lowest CPU utilization. Also disable any post-processing from the decoder.

I did some tests some months ago and I noticed that the only player which can play 720*576 25 Hz content on my PIII 500 MHz machine is mplayer. Maybe you should give mplayer a try.

Mplayer windows binaries: ftp://ftp.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta/

Teqnilogik, you could try Mplayer, as Latexxx said, or ffdshow.

I tried FFDShow and it didn't help. I will try Mplayer, however. I was just curious to why I wasn't getting full playback speed on my 800MHz. It's not a big deal to me as I have a 2.8GHz machine as well. Thanks for all your help.

I always thought FFDShow had the lowest CPU Utilisation... Is XviD, 3ivx or DivX lower? Anyone fancy having a guesstimate at putting those in order?

As I recall, I could play 640x___ stuff ok on my old PIII 450mhz. Think any higher resolution than that wasnt too smart though. And I've always used MPC.

I'm pretty sure I can handle lowish (sub 1000) bitrates fine at 720x with 16:9 content. I know though that my computer (PII350, media player classic and ffdshow) dies on 4:3 content down to 640x (because of the sheer number of pixels).

I would recommend Videolan because the program is using his own library. My experience is that friends of mine which couldn't view XviD movies on other players were totally satidfied with it.

And in my opinion ffdshow is using HUGE cpu power because it's a postprocessing filter.

Another question: do really encode your movie at 29 fps??? try open it in virtualdubmod and go for the fileinfo.

ffdshow has fairly low CPU utilization (as attested by my PII350), if you turn the post-processing off (which is very easy).

yes, ffdshow as far as i've been able to see is the fastest directshow decoder.

mplayer is actually twice as fast, though they are both using ffmpeg to decode. i put the extra speed down to directshow bloat.

to clarify - i've done some encodes of field-blended stuff bobbed up to 50fps, 512x384, plus vobsub subtitles (it's anime, and i hate english dubs).

xvid+directvobsub choke on these videos - i'll get a gillion freezed frames, and average decoding rate is about 30fps when it's not frozen.

ffdshow+directvobsub performs a little better - about 40fps.

ffdshow+internal vobsub decoding gives me ~49.998fps, with the occasional frozen GOP. i consider this enough performance to be used.

mplayer+directx output (mplayer accepts vobsub) gives me flawless decoding at ~48% CPU usage.

mplayer+null output (as a benchmark) gives me a staggering 30% CPU usage.

i'm running a p3 733, geforce DDR 32 (old, old), and 384 RAM on win2k.

i haven't done a speed check under linux, as all i have is a live CD distro, and haven't got the hang of it. i'm willing to bet it's faster under linux, though

it's amazing what you can squeeze out of a ~5 year old machine.