Itronics player doesn't work on slower computers

[Pev]

I have a recent laptop/netbook but I had to tweak settings to get VLC to play HD movies. The ITronics player uses VLC but unfortunately doesn't expose any of VLC's settings! So in case anyone else is having this issue, I have a workaround. I wrote a "proxy dll", which intercepts the initialisation of VLC and injects any additional options you may want. For me all I needed was to enable gpu acceleration and presto, all good.

So if anyone else is having the same trouble, hit up this thread and we'll see if dashcamman wants to make my files available for download. Happy to upload source aswell in case anyone (like me!) doesn't like running untrusted code and would rather build themselves.

Cheers

Pev

 

[ExMet]

I tried playing my 1080p vids on an old laptop running MS XP. The computer slowed to a crawl and the videos wouldn't play.
I'd be interested to see what you've done.

 

[Pev]

I tried it on my old XP netbook (single core atom) but alas no luck. The key is whether you can get VLC to play the videosafter tweaking the settings. If you can manage that, then it's a matter of figuring out the command line options that represent the settings you've altered in the VLC interface, and putting them in the little text file that goes with my dll, and then it should work.

I've just noticed the attachment tab below so I'll attach a zip now. The options text file has all the instructions in it.

Cheers

Pev

 

[DashCamMan]

I tried it on my old XP netbook (single core atom) but alas no luck. The key is whether you can get VLC to play the videosafter tweaking the settings. If you can manage that, then it's a matter of figuring out the command line options that represent the settings you've altered in the VLC interface, and putting them in the little text file that goes with my dll, and then it should work.

I've just noticed the attachment tab below so I'll attach a zip now. The options text file has all the instructions in it.

Cheers

Pev

Thanks for sharing Pev I'm sure this will help out others with older computers.

Dash Cam Man

 

[mituc]

That is really weird, I don't have windows on any hardware machine and I ran the Itronics player in a vmware virtual machine without any visible performance issues...

 

[Pev]

I'll go out on a limb and bet that you have an i7 or an i3. In any case these days running windows on a VM has trivial overhead compared to a full install due to the virtualisation instruction set. It's really quite awesome.

I have a dual-core 64-bit AMD netbook running Windows 7 Home Premium. For whatever reason, they've decided to NOT default to hardware acceleration where available, and evidently my CPU isn't fast enough to decode 1080p (or actually, I suspect more accurately, the threading code has been written empirically using an intel CPU with hyperthreading but that's another matter). So the bottom line is that some of us need to supply settings to the player that arguably, it could have easily detected but such is the world of open source.

Anyway, for the benefit of others I'm attaching an update which gets the folder the executable is running in and looks for the options.txt file in there, as I discovered that the default shortcut on the desktop didn't work as my hook was looking for the options file in the "current" directory.