[Theora] Playback too slow?!

[Ole Tange]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Ivan Popov wrote:

> you may want to try mplayer.theora-mmx from konvalo.org
> (see http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora-dev/2005-March/002742.html)

That screwed up my X. So instead on a 2.4 GHz machine I tried:

  time mplayer.theora-mmx -vo null tmp/m021_300_1_70.ogg

real    0m17.257s

Not good when it should have been 10.1s. However, the dvd-4.theora.ogg
worked fine with 75% cpu-usage of a 2.4 GHz (which is around 1.8 GHz - on
a 2 GHz machine that will leave 10% for X-display)

> > Reading http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2005-March/000777.html it
> > comes to me as a surprise that playback is that hard. I would naively
> > assume that playback was much easier than encoding.
> 
> It _is_ much easier. I play movies in real time on a 800MHz Athlon,
> while I encode the same data [approximately] in real time on a 3GHz P4.

What is the resolution of your source material?

As a user of Theora I would appreciate a collection of statistics: How
fast must a machine be to encode/decode a given resolution in real-time?
The figures should based on worst-case (which I believe my example is
pretty close to).


/Ole