Kino playback quality issues

Hi all,

I installed Mandriva 2008.1 on a not-so-new machine for some simple
video editing; these are the hardware specs:

- Intel Pentium 4 1700MHz CPU
- 1GB of RAM (1 x 512MB + 2 x 256MB)
- nVidia GeForce FX 5500 graphics card (accelerated)

Quite unexpectedly, I run into performance problems with Kino (version
1.2.0). When I play a large raw DV file in Kino's Edit window, I can't
get smooth playback.

After playing around with the settings in Edit -> Preferences ->
Display, and this is what I found:

(Display method is XVideo, with Full interlaced frame shown in all
cases)

- With 'Drop video frames as needed' enabled, audio is OK, but video is
visibly choppy and jumpy. Kino consumes some 75% of CPU, and X just over
20% -- which means that the CPU is only some 2-3% idle. Not good.

- With 'Drop video frames as needed' disabled, it's the other way
round: video playback is a bit smoother now (although not as smooth as
playback in Totem or Kaffeine), but the audio has small but audible
drop-outs, which become quite severe when I even do so much as move the
mouse, let alone open or move dialogs and the likes. In this setting,
Kino consumes slightly less CPU (60%), but X a bit more (28%).


Then I tried this same on a new machine, with better CPU and graphics
card specs:
- Dual-core Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz CPU
- 1GB of RAM
- GeForce 8500 GT graphics card (accelerated), with TwinView enabled.

To my amazement, even with this rather more powerful setup, video
playback is still visibly choppy in all cases. And thisis what top says:
- With 'Drop video frames as needed' enabled, Kino still consumes some
70% of one CPU, and X gobbles up 90% of the other one!
- With 'Drop video frames as needed' disabled, these numbers are 26%
and 21%, respectively, and playback is /still/ a bit choppy. Audio
presents no problems here, though.


Normal video players consume *way* less: Kaffeine, VLC, Totem and
MPLayer: all between 14 and 20% CPU, with X between 3 and 8% (or almost
double these figures for the older machine).
In all cases, playback is perfectly smooth, both audio and video, on
both machines. KdenLive performs completely smoothly too, with 25% CPU,
and another 8% for X.


My question: what could cause these performance problems in Kino? It
must have something to do with changes in Mandriva 2008.1, because I
once had Kino running just fine on an old machine with a 1GHz CPU, 512MB
of RAM and an ancient Matrox graphics card -- under Mandriva 2006, IIRC.

And, of course, there's the question what can be done about it.

Any help is appreciated,

Best regards,

Richard Rasker


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