vlc 0.2.90 observations on ppc

[Eugenio Jarosiewicz]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Jack Howarth wrote:

> Hello,
>     I wanted to pass along a few observations about the
> improved performance of vlc 0.2.90 on a G4/450 running
> Debian ppc sid. The new version seems to play without
> any noticable artifacts. Before with 0.2.83 and some
> test altivec patches from Michel Lanners I would get
> noticable jerkiness in playback and a variation in the
> framerate from between 16-17 to 24 fps. Now on this
> new release with both the imdct and motion compensation
> altivec codecs in use I get a rock solid 23.98 fps as
> measured using the -v flag and the patch below...

Thanks for the feedback.  Yep, these altivec routines have helped
quite a bit.  

> At this frame rate on a PowerMac G4/450 I am getting (using Xvideo)
> this 23.98 fps framerate at about 30% cpu usage on vlc and 25% cpu
> usage on XFree86 4.1. If I stress the machine I don't see any measured
> change in fps (although I may be sampling to coarsely for that) but
> I see a couple late frames skipped. However the video still looks pretty
> good.
>      I do have one question. It seems that the only plugin we don't have
> accelerated compared to mmx on our altivec equiped machines is the yuv
> one. Does anyone know how much that would help and what sort of cpu load
> reduction we should expect if we had it?

Yes, it would help when the OS does not support overlay (LinuxPPC?,
Darwin). It's something we want to get done in the near future.

-ej

-- 
Eugenio Jarosiewicz	  ej0 at cise.ufl.edu	http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ej0
			* Funny how that works *