Mplayer H264 cpu utilization and performance

[benjatelcom]

Greetings All,

Been a long time PC user, and deployed the MAC client on my wife's AL Macbook with 9400M video.

Immediately noticed how poor AVCHD clip playback was on the MAC, SageTV support cited the Mplayer package that supports SageTV on MAC as the source of the troubles. MPEG2 from my NTSC cable tuner worked flawlessly every time on the Mac.

FF two years. Updated Mac to 10.6, upgraded Flash player and have been playing 1080p H.264 HTML5 video content with 10% cpu utilization and Flash player H.264 content with 30% cpu utilization.

I just upgraded my tuner solution to Nextcom R5000 on Dish. Throwing 720p and 1080i H.264 at the Mac like crazy and it just chokes on it with 100% cpu utilization. Switching from my 802.11n network to Ethernet helps just a tiny bit. MPEG2 SD still works flawlessly and H.264 SD works well.

Obviously Apple includes an h.264 decoder on each machine because html5 needs a local decoder to play this content.

What is my problem with the Mac?

[sandor]

do the HD videos play well outside of Sage?

in Quicktime?
in VLC?

[benjatelcom]

yes(kind of) and no.

Quicktime plays them back silky smooth with low cpu utilization if I remux the video streams into an MP4 container. Quicktime doesn't want to play nice with M2TS files, although it is the preferred streaming container for quicktime and iphone! It just wont play the files, even though it can play the program streams.

VLC is pure software decode, it almost plays it smoothly but doesn't make it.

And my Intel Atom 1.6Ghz ION LE based netbook can play it like a champ with about 20% cpu utilization in WMP or cyberlink and Sagetv client.