Re: to be effcient or not to be efficient

Enrico Weigelt wrote:

> <snip>
> 
>>My point here is that dropping frames and even more, dropping audio 
>>samples is *no* option to me. 
> 
> Why not ?
> I've currently sitting in front of a machine, which is too slow to handle
> the full frame rate. mplayer's frame dropping works fine here.

The eye doesn't have much problem when images are repeated once in a 
while. For audio it's definitely ugly !

> <snip>
> 
>>Image someone playing live and once in a while there is no sound. Just 
>>because his system is fast enough for the general case but not enough 
>>for the worst case... Caching data should make it possible to work even 
>>in the worst case (to prepare data in advance).
> 
> In realtime applications you cannot do more computing than you have 
> CPU time for. I've also some divx videos which my machine is tool slow for.
> But therefore I can recode them to "faster" formats (thanks to mencoder)

In any application you can't compute more than your CPU ;) That has 
nothing to do with real-time. But with real-time applications it might 
be needed to ensure some requirements like "audio should never be 
dropped unless the CPU can't handle the audio stream alone".