[Sunhelp] MP3 Player using an LX

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 9 May 2000, Doug McLaren wrote:

> I tried the same thing and had the same results - the LX is just not
> quite fast enough to play your standard mp3's without losing quality.
> 
> So, unless we can find a more efficient mp3 player (or optimize
> mpg123) or we add some sort of hardware decoder (unlikely) it's just
> not going to work.

Have you tried Sun showmetv?  It's actually quite light CPU-wise though a
bit bare on features.

> Actually, it's possible (but unlikely) that Sparc Linux is a bit
> faster than Solaris on that box, and that it could play it without
> downsampling.  It's a long shot, but maybe it's worth a try.

You're CPU bound, not kernel bound.  Faster codecs are the only things
that will help, and Sparc Linux audio support is marginal.

If you've got enough CPU but interrupts from other programs are killing
you, try using dispadmin to decrease the size of the timeslices used by
the scheduler.  Going to the RT time class may help as well.

Have you tried seeing how fast mpg123 can decode straight to a file?  If
you can get it any faster than 176K/s then throwing in a ring buffer on
the audio output will help.

-James