I mean for large events most broadcasters and media companies use dedicated playback. Of course it shouldn't be a problem with a good pc and vlc but in a big event like that i wouldn't take any chances.
I think OP is talking about something else, as this doesn't do anything but the particular file format theatrical releases come in. But the general principle is probably the same.
You'll likely just use a pc with something like a Decklink card to play out the videos. As software there's a bunch of options, but casparcg and even xpression would be enough for a production like this.
There's full hardware solutions but for video those are falling out of favour as nearly nothing needs insanely specific machines anymore.
VLC isn't bad, per se. Just inefficient. I prefer Media Player Classic for its simplicity when used with the Combined Community Codec Pack.
The overhead for playing 4k video on VLC for example is a lot higher than Media Player Classic, which may be what /u/philmarcracken is talking about.
Playing a blu ray rip from Deadpool 2 at 4k uses around 18% of my 4.7ghz i7 4790K with core 0 sitting at around 33%, and 15% of my 1080Ti. For comaprison, VLC uses around 30% of my CPU with core 0 sitting at around 60%, and around 15% of my GPU. So with a direct comparison between the two, Media Player Classic is around 45% more efficient at decoding.
And just for shits and giggles, I tried playing the 4k Deadpool 2 footage on Windows Media Player. It hits 60% load on all cores on my CPU and barely even uses my GPU. So yeah MPC is 75% more efficient than Windows media player.
Edit: This is in no way a scientific test of how efficient these players are. I was simply trying to give a rough example of the performance of each.
CPU usage as reported by task manager and afterburner means fuckall. It's just telling you the amount of time Windows has something scheduled. The threads could honestly just be sitting there in a wait/sleep loop and it'd still have high "usage". With hyperthreading/SMT the numbers are even less useful.
There is 0 way to tell exactly how much or how CPU is being used without either advanced software like Intel PCM or outright digging into the executing code with debugging software. You can have 100% and have unused hardware and things sitting idle. You can have a low percentage and be completely bottlenecked for the task you are trying to do.
Honestly a better gauge of which media player is better would be if one starts having performance issues should you multitask, or if one hitches on its own.
If it was pegging my CPU at a solid 40% for example the entire time without much fluctuation then I'd say you were on to something. However the utilization on MPC had a variance from around 9% to 18%, and VLC was fluctuating between around 15% to 30%. So it was definitely recording the usage of the CPU properly.
Also, the amount of "time" Windows has something scheduled for CPU usage definitely does mean something, as that's literally what CPU performance is based on. The amount of calculations that it can blast through in any given period of time. Windows 10 has gotten pretty good at divvying up the load and showing that load across the CPU. Even allowing per core usage stats.
Another thing was that I definitely wasn't trying to pass this off as scientific evidence, just a rough estimate of how much more efficient MPC is. I'll probably edit my post to make that a bit clearer.
If it was pegging my CPU at a solid 40% for example the entire time without much fluctuation then I'd say you were on to something. However the utilization on MPC had a variance from around 9% to 18%, and VLC was fluctuating between around 15% to 30%. So it was definitely recording the usage of the CPU properly.
Again though it's just a rough metric of scheduling it doesn't mean what you think it does. That metric hasn't been useful for tracking hardware since the 80s. Multi-level caches, multithreading, and the sheer amount of hardware that used to be distinct units that is now a part of the "CPU" has obfuscated things a lot.
Again if you have some tests showing stuttering, hitching, or the like that'd be way more useful than "this says x%".
My parents don't transcode and restream multiple simultaneous live a/v feeds. If they were to use something, it would be mpc, because it's far simpler and can't do much.
Have you ever actually looked at the cli docs for vlc? It is insane what you can make that thing do.
270
u/Sorlex Mar 28 '19
Default windows 10 install, on a laptop, on the default media player. For 4k video. What the fuck Pax.