[streaming] Q: what does CPU do when just streaming?

[Anthony Loiseau]

Hi,

Since ages, I thought streaming was just read a file and provide it to
an UDP socket. In this case, it should not be CPU intensive at all.

More and more, we are streaming higher quality videos and today I am
facing CPU consumption. Here are some fingers:

 in:
 - Streamer computer:  Dell XPS, intel core2 duo
                                2.1 GHz ; 3GB RAM
 - VLC 0.9.0 
      from a no so old nightly build
      (less than a week, based on git commit 7024531033)

 - Streammed media: Blue ray, h264 video track (file.m2ts)


 out:
 - Bandwidth estimated as 3MB/s on the network, max 3.5MB
 - CPU: average=18%, high=28%(complex pictures), max=50%(1CPU)
 - RAM: 34MB to 40MB most of the time, max around 45MB


Is it possible doing the same with a CPU consumption lesser that 20%? Or
even 10%? :-)

Obviously, I am missing something to understand this CPU consumption.
Can anybody give me (or point me to) some explanations, some tricks
about this issue?

Thanks in advance.


best regards,
Anthony