Movies stutter in gnome-mplayer, but not in gmplayer

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Play a movie using gmplayer. Nice & smooth
2. Play same movie using gnome-mplayer. Get occasional, but noticeable stutter.
3. Tested using medium resolution .mov movies on
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/startrek/ (downloaded them to disc
for replay).

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Smooth video. But get occasional stutter.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Happens with gnome-mplayer 0.7.0 and 0.9.5
Ubuntu Intrepid 8.1, 1.5GHz PC

Please provide any additional information below.
Same behaviour if using Ubuntu stock mplayer or recent mplayer build
SVN-r29318-4.3.2.  Changing sound drivers or video drivers doesn't help.
Problem noticeable with other video media as well. Strongly suspect the
problem is in the integration of mplayer into gnome. Maybe gnome makes the
framebuffer update slower?  No issues when using gmplayer, however. 
Unfortunately this performance bug will probably mean I have to revert to
using the mozilla-mplayer plug-in for now. 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by ticketto...@yahoo.co.uk on 4 Jun 2009 at 10:09

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What video output are you using? Suggest switching to xv or gl. Mplayer is just
drawing to the window that is provided. Really nothing should be slowing it 
down.

Original comment by kdeko...@gmail.com on 4 Jun 2009 at 10:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Gosh, that was a quick response!
I have tried both xv and gl. Both produce the problem. A casual viewer may not 
notice
the issue. It is quite easy to see in the startrek trailer in the scene where 
the
young Kirk rides his motorbike across the screen in the distance from left to 
right.
I consistently see a stutter instead of a smooth ride. It happens in normal 
window
and on full screen. I am not using compiz.

Original comment by ticketto...@yahoo.co.uk on 4 Jun 2009 at 10:37

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Next thing to try is to go into Edit->Preferences [Mplayer] and uncheck 
Deinterlace
Video and perhaps check Drop Frames.

Original comment by kdeko...@gmail.com on 4 Jun 2009 at 11:34

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I think I found the problem. In ~/.mplayer/config in the [default] section I 
had a
dr=on.  This didn't seem to affect gmplayer or mplayer, but for some reason 
gave some
trouble to gnome-mplayer. The playback on gnome-player and gmplayer now look
identical.  There may still be a slight performance hit in gnome-mplayer when 
playing
HD videos of 1920x816 resolution when compared to gmplayer, but my PC can't play
these at real time rates anyway. With gmplayer it is smooth, slow motion, with
gnome-mplayer it is the same, but an occasional stutter on fast moving scenes. 
I am
not too bothered by this.

Deinterlace Video has not been checked during all these tests, and drop frames 
is
unchecked.

This might be a good time to say what I should be putting into the config 
files, if
anything, and where.  In ~/.mplayer there are these files:

config  ( with sections [default] and [gnome-mplayer] )
gui.conf
mplayerplug-in.conf

I'm not sure what gui.conf is for.  Also, do the settings in [default] override 
those
in [gnome-mplayer] ?

In fiddling around I encountered a strange behaviour. Maybe I need to file this 
as a
possible bug, but at one point gnome-mplayer would not scale the movie to match 
the
window size. If I went to full screen, the video would stay the same size in 
the top
left hand corner.  After fiddling with aspect ratios and the like, the behaviour
returned to normal. I am not sure how to reproduce this. Has such behaviour 
been seen
before?

Thanks for the help.

Original comment by ticketto...@yahoo.co.uk on 5 Jun 2009 at 8:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Appears to be a configuration problem not cause by gnome-mplayer.

~/.mplayer/config   only the [gnome-mplayer] section is used
~/.mplayer/gui.conf is not used
~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf is not used

~/.config/gnome-mplayer/gnome-mplayer.conf is used, if you are not using gconf

As for your resize issues, if you manually edit the files, several things can 
break.
Just use the application to edit them preferences, it will set everything up 
for you
correctly.

Original comment by kdeko...@gmail.com on 8 Jun 2009 at 5:36

• Changed state: Done