Any video players that support multiple cores?
 

I really need one, even with core codec 1080p h/x264 videos lag. Don't feel like OCing my quad core to solve it.

This is a problem more with your codecs than with the player. Basically, the central component of any playback system should be ffdshow, but there's more than one version. ffdshow-tryouts is multithreaded, which should mean it runs faster on quad-core systems.

If you want to give it a go, just uninstall your current setup and install CCCP. You can install ffdshow tryouts separately, but this is the easy option.

I was actually using the latest CCCP. Oh well, I'll find out when my next 1080p finishes downloading.

Strange that... if you read this thread as an example where they say that ffdshow-tryouts features partially multi-threaded x264 playback...

Oh wait... go to your Start Menu->CCCP->FFDShow Video Decoder Configuration and choose the "Miscellaneous" page. Then set the number of threads to something other than "1" to see if that helps.

The popup info thing for that says "mpeg 1/2 decoding only"
edit: seems to use 20-50% cpu in the video I just got, while the one I tried weeks ago used 25% max. I guess it worked. Wonder why the other one only used one core.

Apologies for threadjacking, but is there a similar solution for Mac OS X? I have a G5 quad and 1080p files, depending on codec (usually AVC1 is most problematic), lag like a motherfucker.

Doesn't have to be an Aquafied solution - I'm comfortable using DarwinPorts, compiling from source, whatever.

You could try to disable in-loop filtering or deblocking if ffdshow allows access to these ffmpeg options.

Possibly, yeah. I'll have to sift through VLC's control panel for ffmpeg.

Oh, and there's another question for ya. Is there a better option than VLC on the Mac for decoding HD or other high-bitrate content? VLC did the trick years ago when I needed to play some AVI file and I just stuck with it out of habit.

AFAIK mplayer can use the CoreAVC H264 decoding library in an 32bit x86 environment for faster decoding.
CoreAVC should be faster but according to what I have read it's not fully standard compliant and does NOT produce reference outputs. So their code optimizations are not lossless and show in the decoded frames.

A G5 is a PowerPC architecuture, right? I'm not really into Macs so I can only guess here. Seems like mplayer with CoreAVC won't work for you.

Yeah, G5 is 64-bit PPC. I run into that trouble a lot when people recommend software. "Try to compile x app with y library...oh, you're on PPC970? Sorry, no soup for you."

At any rate, I'll see about tweaking VLC and find out where that gets me.

I was under the impression that the libavcodec part from ffmpeg has a lot of hand-optimized x86 assembly integrated. I don't know about PPC architecture though.

As ffmpeg is both used by VLC and mplayer you could also give mplayer a try, without the CoreAVC component of course.

With mplayer you could try these libavcodec parameters:
lavdopts=fast=1:skiploopfilter=all

This of course reduces image quality but should increase decoding performance by a great deal.

MPC HC.
http://tibrium.neuf.fr/

supports multi core h264 decoding, even hardware acceleration. As picky DXVA is, when it works, I get 1% cpu usage for 1080p movies.

Latest ffdshow builds have correct multicore usage for h264, although ffdshow is still the slowest h264 decoder (I only had lag on one scene ever though, and on that one the bitrate shot up to 30k - using e6550 2,8ghz). I'm using ffdshow_rev1890_20080307_clsid at the moment, though its probably time to check a newer build with that movie. For the record, the internal MPC HC h264 filter was running that scene lag free, without hardware acceleration.

x264.nl is a good place to get latest ffdshow binaries from (dunno the site for the daily builds).

If you are on some slow ass athlon, pirate the latest CoreAVC. It's a good deal faster, a friend of mine was running 720p fine on a P4C 2.4ghz, and I was having no problems with 1080p on my old, super slow athlon x2 3800 (early crap model).

edit: meh, didnt notice the thread is about macfags now.