My desktop computer died, so I replaced it with a laptop. I saved the PCI capture card out of it, and put it in a junk 933 mhz P3 lyin' around... I want to digitize some vhs tape, but the P3 doesn't seem fast enough....Its running debian squeeze. I have managed to get it to record but not without skipping frames and lagging...I am using mplayer as on the commandline as the capture program. Its running just a bare commandline, no x or anything. Any options I can feed mplayer to cut down on the cpu usage? I would think 933 mhz would be fast enough...I don't know how fast the IDE drive is thats in there...Quality isn't a huge deal (the capture card is a piece of crap sabrent anyway)

Would mplayer's -noframedrop option apply to this situation?

So you're not seeing this, you're not hearing it, it's just going straight to video file?

Mplayer uses throws up ideas on that

No. it isn't.
How, with -dumpstream -dumpfile?
Yes there is, depends on the video type.

For mpeg1/2 or mpeg4 try adding -nodouble or mplayer -lavdopts lowres=1
-vfm ffmpeg will use half-res decoding to speed things up as well.

for H264 try mplayer -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all file.mkv
might cause artefacts like sudden color changes, in this case try e.g. "nonref" instead of "all"

(use -lavdopts skipframe=nonref:skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 for even more speedup, skipframe also works with VDPAU.)

First show how you are capturing the video to file. What kind of video is it? mpeg2? Can you make a raw video dump to file and then encode it later? Show what you are doing.