videolan vs mplayer classic

[shadowspawn]

plase bear with me, i'm kinda tired. cliffnote verson is that media player classic seems to have received a shot in the arm for slower hardware and i can't figure out what happened,

i handle some real older systems; my thatre comp is a p3 500, w2k voodoo3, i usually run powerdvd on it, some laptops are ibm 600x's. some desktops on the network are even more archaic. i run a network for students to watch movies if they want to; it's free for them, I just offer it. I use vlc to stream allot for popular movies, otherwise I just have them on shares. many os's, most w2k/xp.

I just noticed something and wanted to get it off my chest.

somthing happened (or did not happen) with the last release of media player classic that differs from videolan. i mean vlc is a great app, but on the slower machines what was great (videolan) has lost favor, what was slow (mplayer classic) is now faster.

by faster i mean by comparison now videolan stutters, lags on video and audio. they both did. now mpc doesn't. something happened with mpc or some codecs. now only vlc tends to stutter allot and fails quite often by stalling on video wheras before each handled poorly.

again these observations are on older, "slower" platforms, all win32. wireless connections to a share, 10mbit connections over a switch, multiple accesses via os shares. power comps still work great with vlc. never had issues with fast comps.

I host movies for a small network, vlc seems to have issues lately. or rather the issues which i've always grown to accept simply dissapeared with mpc, so i'm wondering what magic they did that vlc didn't.

wmp and winamp are the slowest and are not part of this discovery report.

there are other areas where vlc has improved. but overall I was just shocked this last month on how some movie/codecs that were previosly unwatchable with any player now are handled, synched (from weird encodings) on mpc and not vlc. someone brought it to my attention; i tested it and yes mpc now outpderforms vlc in quite a few areas,

for some reason mpc after the latest klite pack just blew vlc away.

is this something with klite? codecs? whatever it is, can vlc be brought to the same level?

i understand that vlc is strict with it's encoding requirements, mpc used to be as strict. mpc used to suck, imo, compared to vlc. but since i'm basing this post in older, slower hardware it's difficult.

gotta keep in mind these movies that had roblems on slower hardware are accessed in many ways; some via wireless, some via switched copper network, all directly accessed by a shared hd or cdrom. faster comps (>1ghz) never had a problem, I was teetering on upping the min recomended requirements till tonight after I was shocked after seeing how the latest mpc handled some; it was like some got new hardware to watch movies.

for example, a 2gb movie previously unplayable over the network (share) by a p3 compaq was able to be played perfectly by not only him, but 3 concurrent clients that also couldn't previosly play it with mpc. VLC still stuttered, lost synch, crapped out. Other movies that played fine still play fine, just one that never really did play on slower hardware even locally now does with mpc, over a network share at that.

ogm, xvid, divx, mkv, doesn't matter. movies that were archived that previously couldn't be watched on legacy hardware now can be with mpc, still not at all or at best choppy with vlc.

I'm using the latest vlc; is this a borked/experimental build, or did the codecs change so that vlc didn't catch up?

I'll ppost dxdiags and perfmon graphs if it would help, but others running "not the latest space-shuttle" hardware outside my network see this also.

i love vlc, just wondering what's going on that I don't know about.

[The DJ]

oh man this is long !!!

[The DJ]

1: You didn't say what was the latest
2: VLC used to have a high priority, but we made this lower, because on really slow machines that really couldn't handle the video, it would lock up the PC. You can still reenable this setting (somewhere) in the prefs
3: VLC doesn't like to skip. It tries to playback EVERY frame if it can. Other programs are usually better at skipping frames when the CPU load is getting to high
4: VLC has grown tremendiously in capabilities over the last year. This almost certainly made it somewhat slower in certain arreas.
5: streaming over WLAN and other high latency, high packetloss connections is something that really takes a toll. This can mean for VLC for instance that it isn't getting the data fast enough and it hates that. Instead of waiting for the data, it will skip over, keeping with the original timeline of the feed (VLC was designed for live streaming). This can result in constant skipping/not playing