SMPlayer Support Forum

I've been experiencing recurring and annoying frame-rate drops while using SMplayer. I watch 1080p anime in SMplayer and at certain points in each video the frame rate will drop drastically, or it'll go out of sync. Usually, it'll either become very choppy, or just freeze at one frame while the video goes on. After a little while, it'll usually return to normal. I know it's not the files since I have played these exact videos in other video-players with no such problems. I originally believed that it was random, but lately I've realized that it only ever does this during scenes where there is a ton of stuff going on-screen. For example, whenever there is a flash-back scene where a heavy blurry filter that looks like static is on-screen, the video sometimes becomes so choppy or goes out of sync to the point it's sometimes unwatchable. I've tinkered around in the preferences, but nothing seems to fix it.

My specs are:

2.8 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
ATI Radeon HD4670
4GB ram
Windows Vista.

My specs shouldn't give me any problem with HD content, so what's the issue?

As far as I know, mplayer on windows doesn't use hardware decoding so you need a real fast computer to play 1080p videos.

There's a different version of mplayer which can use multiple threads for decoding, improving performance a lot. You can get that version here: http://kovensky.project357.com

Configure smplayer (preferences -> general) to use that mplayer build, and then select at least 2 threads for decoding in preferences -> performance.

Additionally If you have problems with mp4 and mov files, I suggest to set the cache for file to 0.

BTW, I made a few days ago a package with the latest version of smplayer and a version of mplayer with multithread support:

Nice post. This is a great work.

As far as I know, mplayer on windows doesn't use hardware decoding so you need a real fast computer to play 1080p videos.

A multithreaded MPlayer build would definitely help for multi-core processors. I can play at least 40Mbit 1080p videos if I use 4 threads, I have a Pentium D EE 965.