i am using mplayer 0.92 version and it is taking 40 % of cpu, having two mplayer instances plus x windows takes 100 percent..... can't stand it...
is there a way to make it less cpu hungry?
thanks
Jeff

What is it you are doing when it is taking up all that cpu power? Watching a video? Those video codecs are CPU hogs.

they are just avi files, encoded by indeo5.....this damn codec caused all these cpu headaches.
once i encoded them with mencoder, they run quite well...
thanks jtshaw for your comments

If you have an even slightly modern graphics card, make sure you've got XV support in X, and always use -vo xv. Best done by editing ~/.mplayer/config and writing "vo=xv" in it. Depending on your circumstances, -vo dga or -vo gl might be preferable.

To tell how much of CPU usage is due to decoding video and sound, try "mplayer divxfile.avi -vo null". I'm sure what you'll find is that the overhead is tiny - in theory a p300 could probably play most high resolution divx movies. The real issue is how efficient your display and scaling mechanisms are.

it is the indeo5 codec which takes a lot os cpu, after i mencoded the AVIs into ffmpeg, I am happy, cpu usage dropped by 20%.