Verrry high CPU useage!

[It's Deano]

I notice that a single VLC instance hikes my CPU up to over 90% useage, irrespective of the class of CPU I'm using (tried with a 500Mhz PIII and a 1.5Mhz P4 with the same results). I'm not doing anything 'clever', simply a single stream transcoding and playing an AVI file.

Anyone got any ideas how I can reduce that useage? I notice on the VLC main page we're told VLC uses very little CPU!

Rgds Deano

[nm]

VLC uses little CPU compared to many other video players although at least MPlayer is usually faster. Playing back DVD-resolution MPEG-2 video will easily take 90% of the CPU on a 500MHz machine if your video output is not accelerated (XVideo) or you are using an old PCI graphics card with slow video memory access.

I assume you tried transcoding on the 1.5 GHz machine and that resulted in high CPU usage too. Transcoding is much more complicated than plain decoding since the video needs to be decoded and then encoded. I would say it is definitely something quite "clever". I'm not sure how advanced encoding techniques VLC uses, but it probably takes couple times more CPU time than plain decoding without displaying the video.

There is really not much that the developers can do to make VLC substantially faster in your case. Check the XVideo support and if it is fine, you could try MPlayer to squeeze the CPU usage down to 70% or so. If this is not enough, you'll need to drop the resolution of the encoded video somehow.

[It's Deano]

... That's as clear an explanation as I hoped for, and thanks for your suggestions; I'll certainly give 'em a try

rgds Deano