WMV3 CPU Usage?

hyuga

Guest

I am having problems playing an AVI file that uses the Windows Media 9 (wmv3) codec. When I play this file on a Pentium M 1.6GHz, it uses 100% of the CPU. :-O

I would normally think that the system was too slow to decode the video. The problem is that this video seems to play perfectly on an Xbox running XBMC (Xbox Media Center)...

Here is the information from AVIcodec:
File : 233 MB (233 M, duration: 0:24:13, type: AVI, 1 audio stream(s), quality: 52 %

Video : 214 MB, 1238 Kbps, 23.976 fps, 720*404 (16:9), WMV3 = Windows Media Video 9, Supported

Audio : 18.61 MB, 107 Kbps, 44100 Hz, 2 channels, 0x55 = MPEG Layer-3, Supported

Do I need to configure something different in the PC in order for this file to play? Any ideas of what can be causing this?

anonymous

Guest

Windows Media Video 9 is like divx 5: it’s a very processor-intensive codec. Especially at the high resolutions. Be happy if your pc can play it without dropping frames! There are things you can do to reserve as much CPU power to playback as possible. Close everything in your system tray (like those dormant file-sharing, media players (real, quicktime), or instant messengers (msn, yahoo, aim, icq)). Close all other running programs (firewall, antivirus, everything). Temporarily shut down some services like automatic updates, task scheduler or system restore (for advanced users only).

hyuga

Guest

Thanks for the information.

What puzzles me is that the Xbox is a 733MHz system. Granted it is dedicated, so nothing else is running, I was still surprised that a 1.6GHz Pentium M, which is supposed to be faster than a Pentium 4-M, is having trouble keeping up with the same video file. I was thinking the codec configuration on the Xbox was skipping frames in order to keep up, but the statistics show no dropped frames.

divx 5 video at that same resolution uses about 24% of the CPU, so I was surprised that wmv 9 took more than three times that...

hyuga

Guest

I was able to circumvent the problem. I was using WindowsMedia Player 6.4 (the one that is part of the default Windows XP installation). As soon as I switched to Media Player Classic (MPC 6.4.8.2), the problem went away.

The CPU usage went from pegged (100%) to 20-26%.

Nosmo_King

Guest

I have a similar problem. Two machines one old 933 MHz PIII 384 Mb ram (used for testing) and one 2.6 GHz Celeron 512 Mb ram. Both XP sp2. I use Media Player Classic on both computers to play streaming ASF and WMV file’s from the yahoo launch site. On the 933 MHz computer, I get a CPU utilisation around 30 % and on the 2.6 GHz machine, it is around 95-100 %.

Streaming Apple trailers .MOV files are playing fine on both computers. (CPU 30% also using MPC).

Could this be a codex problem? If so, where can I find witch Codex is used for witch file extension.

Nosmo King

Regular
Rep: 6

Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,286

(No solution provided here - just personal observations)
I used to have a K6-2 500MHz and playback of divx 5 movies (high-res ones - 720x480) would always drop frames, freeze, and play the sound totally out of sync, even though cpu usage was at 100%. The same would happen with wmv 9.
Now that I’m using an athlon xp 3000 (2.1 GHz) the same divx movies take about 10% of cpu power (varies between about 7% and 15%) and the wmv 9 movies take about 30% of cpu power (25-35). Note that for the divx 5 decoder settings I disable post-processing and film effect altogether. If I enable full post-processing the cpu use jumps to about 30% as well.