OK, well, I think I have found a fix which is not perfect, but which will work well for me for a while.
In the DirectVobSub configuration, under the Misc tab, there is an option called Pre-buffer subpictures, which seems to be checked by default. I unchecked it, and my CPU usage went down dramatically. This happened in both BSPlayer and Windows Media Player, as well as GSpot.
I have no idea what this option does. It makes it sound a bit like DVS loads a bunch of subtitles into some buffer, to make them ready to be displayed when they are needed in the movie. But then why doesn't it just say Pre-buffer subtitles? Also, why would DVS need to use a buffer for subtitles? The subtitles are just being read from a text-file, which I thought would be a fast enough operation to make buffering unnecessary.
This makes me wonder just what a "subpicture" is, and what it has to do with subtitles. I wonder if it's related to what I read about DVD subtitles, and how they are actually images, not text.
Again, I really know very little about DVS and how it works, and information about it seems rather hard to find.
By the way, this doesn't completely solve my CPU-usage problems. I was watching the CPU-meter closely during playback while checking this, and I noticed that it jumps around between 30% and 90% (which is better than the 90-100% I had before). But this time, the high CPU usage seems to be caused directly by the amount of action in the movie itself. If a scene has a lot of movement, CPU usage jumps to around 90% (sometimes even higher). When there is little movement, CPU usage stays between 30% and 40%.
I think the solution here is probably to get a faster CPU :) , or maybe to stop downloading high-action movies and just start watching boring ones instead :D .
Anyway, I'll probably try fooling around some more with the video-rendering options in BSPlayer to see if there's anything more that I could do about this.
I think my DVS problems are over (for now), since the CPU-usage issue now seems to be caused by the video itself, not the subtitles.
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