VLC on low end computers

[ksd]

I'm a newb at this forum so the question may be silly, totally out of sync, but...

I'm running the VLC (version 1.0.1 Goldeneye) at the 800 MHz single board computer (VIA C3 CPU).
the operating system is Debian Linux (Lenny) 5.0.
When I try to play (e.g. decode) the AVI file with MPEG-4 SD content (codec XVID) the video is choppy
(freezes and tiling) and from time to time VLC throws error messages:

avcodec error: more than 5 seconds of late video -> dropping frame (computer too slow ?)

I did some googling and tried (almost) all tricks I found:

1) to disable post-processing and deinterlace
2) in the preferences set the "skip filter for H.264" to "all"
3) increased caching at Settings->Preferences->Access Modules->File (to 10 sec)
4) re-built ffmpeg with MMX and 3DNOW! optimization enabled

Nothing helps.Btw the file is located at the hard drive.

The "top" command shows VLC's CPU utilisation jumping to 70-80%.

Does anybody have any experience with running VLC at low end computers?
Is there any way to do some VLC profiling, to identify bottlenecks - I'm ready to mess with
the code if required.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Try vlc --no-hq-resampling --no-audio-time-stretch.
You may also want to try to use ffmpeg instead of libmad/liba52/libdca for audio decoding.

[ksd]

I tried vlc --no-hq-resampling --no-audio-time-stretch - no improvement.

But I noticed that there are issues with the audio at this machine - VLC prints warnings like this:

ALSA lib confmisc.c 768 (parse card) cannot find card '0'

May these (or similar) audio issues be the root cause of my VLC performance troubles?