Using htop (conveniently provided recently by aragon) I have been comparing the resources used by various media players and gxine uses more of them than not only xine-ui but more than any other media player! The numbers only apply to my 900MHz P3, but the relative values should hold. Htop also shows multiple tasks for each program, so that number also should be pegged to htop. It is the CPU number that caught my attention.
.....................CPU......................Tasks.................Mem
Base...........0.7%.......................14.......................49
gxine.......13.2%...................... 27........................68
Xine...........6.0%.......................33....................... 66
The Base is with Opera open and showing www.shoutcast.com and htop open. I then clicked the same station each time, Swiss Groove, and watched htop. The CPU numer varied around the median value I selected. I have obtained these same results consistently and the test is easy enough to set up so perhaps we could get some other numbers for comparison.
Since Xine is available and has quite a few pleasant looking skins, I can't imagine why I would use gxine.
I was testing players that play streaming audio, but for mp3's that are on one's computer, zigbert has built Pmusic. I left out xmms, which requires gtk1, which is not present in Puppy 4, plus xmms is not being maintained--the original developers are working on xmms2. I always liked xmms myself and it would run comparably to bmp (or even a little lighter). I also left out audacious because I got confused with all the dependencies. Additionally, although there are at least three different versions of audacious available on these forums, none of them are the current 1.5.1. There are already some strong alternatives to audacious and xmms which are much easier to install and use.
Here are some other results, for anyone who might be interested.
............................CPU.............Tasks...............Mem
Base...................0.7%..............14....................49
Realplayer..........7.9%..............24...................56
vlc 0.8.6h..........3.3%..............23....................54
vlc 0.9.2............3.3%..............27....................58
bmp....................2.0%..............20....................53 (beep media player pet)
foobar2000.......2.6%..............35....................65 (wine)
gxine.................13.2%...............27....................68
Xine...................6.0%...............33....................66 (Petget)
Beep-Media-Player and foobar2000 are audio only players; bmp had the lowest resource requirements overall (and played mp3's very well--but it did not play streaming aac+); foobar2000 beat everything but bmp, and that is running in wine!
Realplayer and Xine had more or less comparable requirements and in my experience approximately equal success in playing video formats (others will surely have more experience than I do at video formats). In my experience Realplayer is best at conveniently listening to real audio and video formats (such as on the BBC). I think that Realplayer does not play flac. Realplayer is also free but not open source.
The vlc players are not completely ready for Puppy. ttuuxxx and mikeb are working on them--and you can see their resource usage is admirably low. If they can be completely dialed in they would play "all" audio and video formats (providing a possible alternative to xine).
Pmusic http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 98&t=31206
Beep-Media-Player http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 13&t=20919
Realplayer http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 42&t=27761
VLC http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=31890
foobar2000 http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 69&t=32489
htop http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=33785
