Re: [gentoo-user] Playing video and CPU usage

[Dale]

Andrew Udvare wrote:
>> On 2019-01-12, at 00:00, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
>>
>> Howdy,
>>
>> As some know, I recently bought a video card.  While not the most modern
>> thing, it is a lot faster than my old one.  I have a question tho.  When
>> I'm watching TV and playing a video with Smplayer, high resolution or a
>> medium resolution, it seems to use a good bit of CPU power.  I notice in
>> gkrellm, htop etc that it is using about 20 to sometimes 40 or 50% of
>> CPU power.  Yes, I still have the 8 core CPU in here.  In Smplayer, I
>> have video driver set to "gl(fast)" but have tried other settings as
>> well.  Obviously, some just plain don't work at all.  It causes Smplayer
>> to crash.  I did some googling, I think this is the best driver setting
>> for my card.  It is nvidia based.
> It's not the best setting. You should avoid SMPlayer (IMHO from my experience at this point) and switch to mpv or VLC. You want to enable hardware decoding with VDPAU with any player. That card can decode H.264 fully and partially can decode MPEG-1/2/VC-1. You will see very little CPU usage with VDPAU enabled. The downside is the inability to use software-based filters in real-time, but there is a built-in hardware deinterlacer that significantly beats filters like Yadif.
>


I've tried VLC, don't like it much.  Plus, I have to tell Smplayer to
send audio to the TV not the computer speakers.  I have no idea how to
do that in VLC.  May google that at some point.  Still, just didn't like
VLC much.

I'm using the nvidia drivers.  Info.


[IP-] [  ] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-396.54


I meant to include that in first post but forgot.  Ooops. 

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-)