Faster 1080p playback in mplayer

I figured i should be able to play 1080/720 H.264 video files without it stuttering on my media pc. Since it has a crappy nvidia(the limited G72 version) card, I can not rely on the vdpau-features that offload the decoding on the gpu instead of the cpu. It seemed to be a perfect solution otherwise, but replacing the videocard is not an option at the moment, and I guess I would be forced to get one with a fan, which is not nice.

You would think that with a dual core Intel 2ghz, it would just work, but not.

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 15
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU          6400  @ 2.13GHz
stepping	: 6
cpu MHz		: 1596.000
cache size	: 2048 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 2
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 2
apicid		: 0
initial apicid	: 0
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 10
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow
bogomips	: 4267.30
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

processor	: 1
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 15
model name	: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU          6400  @ 2.13GHz
stepping	: 6
cpu MHz		: 1596.000
cache size	: 2048 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 2
core id		: 1
cpu cores	: 2
apicid		: 1
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 10
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm tpr_shadow
bogomips	: 4266.82
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Mplayer has about a million options, and finding the right ones is tricky, I finally found one that worked for me.

$ mplayer -fs -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0  -zoom -quiet -vo xv  -lavdopts skipframe=nonref:skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 <file>

the key part is the

 -lavdopts skipframe=nonref:skiploopfilter=all:fast=1

Try it, and you’ll see it might work. Ymmv. The quality might be a bit worse, but it wasnt obvious on my old tv.