IRIX and Software

Does anyone know what video formats play nice with mplayer and an EMXI board, seems some do, some don't very well and some outright don't work at all.

I can't speak for an Octane with EMXI, but on a lowly O2 with CRM graphics, I've found MPEG-4 part 2 video with AAC audio plays nicely on mplayer.

300 MHz R5K O2
Full screen video: 320x240 at 300 kbps and audio at 64 kbps.
Widescreen video: 320x180 at 300 kbps and audio at 64 kbps.
CPU usage is at around 40-55%

400 MHz R12K O2
Full screen video: 480x360 at 800 kbps and audio at 128 kbps.
Widescreen video: 480x270 at 800 kbps and audio at 128 kbps.
CPU usage is at around 50%
* 640x480 (full) and 640x360 (wide) resolutions are also playable but CPU usage goes up to 90-95%

So if these are passable on an O2, then a faster system with better graphics will obviously have no problem. I think the key is to use the old MPEG-4 part 2 codec when converting videos for playback on an SGI with mplayer. And keep the resolution to the strict 320/480/640 widths. IRIX seems to love those for video. Can anyone with a VPro Fuel or Octane let me know if 1280x720 MPEG-4 (1200 kbps) is playable on theirs?

No wonder my attempts to convert weren't working very well, handbrake dropped support for divx and xvid quite a while ago. The files that I have been successful with are the older ones which are quite suitable for me.

It also turned out that some of the videos that were struggling had very high bitrates, one was 22000 and it wasn't even HD quality, reducing the bitrate during conversion has made almost any video 700x700ish and below quite acceptable and some of what I thought was stuttering was actually part of the video, the people who created it intentionally put some of the more dramatic scenes into slow motion lol.