I'm looking for some ideas to try and fix the dropped frames that are occurring when I play an HD movie.
The resolution of the movie is 1080p encoded in x264 within a Matroska container. No matter the player that I use, Mplayer, Totem, Xine, Kaffiene, VLC, the framerate always drops and the load on one of the logical CPUs maxes out at 100%.
The uname of the OS would imply SMP is built into the kernel:
Linux maxims-linux 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 02:46:46 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
The system has two dual core Xeon processors clocked at 3.73 GHz, with Hyper Threading turned on this appears in the OS as 8 cores. I have also tried turning off Hyper Threading reducing the cores to 4, but the problem still persists in just the same fashion.
Xine has an option to increase the number of threads on the decode tab, and I have increased and decreased this to the apprioate number given the number of logical cores seen by the OS. Still always one core gets completely utilized while the others sit practically idle.
I have also tried all working video decoding drivers within the xine application and they all more or less do the same thing if they worked at all.
Previously on this machine I had Fedora installed, the x86_64 version, and it played the same movie with better results, but still not perfect. I feel that the hardware is capable of doing it, I just don't know how to configure it to make it happen.