I have a laptop with an i7 CPU, 1.73 GHz, 8GB RAM, Ubuntu 10.04 with an "ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series" graphics card. I have compiz enabled (which may be one of the culprits with the problem below).
I have recorded a few short videos in 720p resolution at 120fps (GoPro Hero 3), stored on my local HD. The mp4 videos range from 30MB to 500MB, so quite small.
I tried a variety of players, none of which seem to respond in real time . In fact the response time is so bad that I get a few frames quite fast at the start but then only the odd frame every second to 5 seconds and the sound seems spliced! One of my 8 cores runs into the ground (100%), the others are essentially unused, with the video player process running at 98%. So obviously this is my limiting factor (can't multi-thread?).
(mplayer, xine both try to play in real time but drop many frames; vlc plays the sound, but shows impressionist rendering and then gets stuck on one frame quite early on; avidemux plays every frame but about 1/6th of real-time speed; cinelerra plays some of the frames only and quite slowly; kdenlive does not allow me to create a 120fps project; Kino converts and down-samples; Lives can't follow; OpenShot plays the sound Ok, but gets stuck on the first frame)
Playing standard 1080p 30fps footage uses about 65% of one core. I did expect that playing 120fps would drop frames, but not to the extent that I only see one every few seconds. In fact I thought that it would play about 1 in 4, which would be great for my purpose.
So I'd really appreciate if any of you had any hint as to how I should configure my video card, system or whatever to get better playback ability, i.e. real-time playback with my raw footage (without conversion or down-sampling prior to viewing).
This also affects my ability to edit the videos as I can't tell what I'm looking at in real time, which is very inconvenient when editing. I do not want to down-sample for the first stage of editing as I want to get a feel for the full video first and choose which sections to slow down for slow-motion and which sections to down-sample for normal real-time play.