Added multithreaded ffmpeg and mplayer to Nepherte’s Unofficial User Repository
I’ve just packaged and added ffmpeg-mt and mplayer-mt to my arch user repository for all of you out there without hardware accelerated video playback. For more information about my personal repository, including usage instructions, view my repo page. To activate n threads in mplayer, use the following command:
mplayer -lavdopts threads=n moviefile
Instead of constantly typing that command, you can also add it to the invaluable mplayer config file located at ~/.mplayer/config:
[default] lavdopts=threads=2
Obviously I’m not one of the happy few that have a graphics card with support for hardware accelerated video playback (vdpau for nvidia). When playing a 1080p high definition movie without vdpau and with the singlethreaded mplayer, the movie becomes pretty much unwatcheable: video stuttering, audio running behind on video or vica versa, fastforwarding crashes mplayer, … It’s odd that in a world full of multicore processors, a multithreaded video player isn’t a commodity and probably never will be. Nonetheless I believe there is actually a market for this. After all, not everyone has a fairly recent graphics card (less than 3 yeard old).
With the multithreaded mplayer all of that changes. I am in the possession of an AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+, the first dual core cpu series of AMD, and playback of a 1080p movie with a video bitrate of 15.5Mbps is smooth. It doesn’t even use the 2 cores to their full potential. It appears I only needed a little more but o so necessary cpu power to play it. Until I buy a recent graphics card, hopefully in the very near future, this will certainly do the trick.