Voodoo 3 working better

[PhiloVivero]

I have some questions for everyone, esp. Rich and Dave.

I have a very fast system with a *LOT* of RAM (Athlon 800, 396MB) and a TNT2.

I will be able to watch upwards of about 5-10 minutes of movie with only minor
issues:

 - sound doesn't quite sync with video ever (it's close most of the time)
 - sound wobbles, only noticable when music is playing

After several minutes, however, the video will get real choppy for about 3-4
seconds (painful) after which the sound is way out-of-sync with the video
(usually way behind) and so you'll hear everyone talking all high-pitched for
about 20 seconds while it re-syncs.

My hypothesis 1: I'm running out of RAM as the video stream is cached, and
once the disk starts paging, the 3-4 seconds of nastiness ensues. It then gets
a grip and gets back on track for a while.

My hypothesis 2: No-one ever gets perfectly sync'd sound/video (is this
true?).

My hypothesis 3: No-one ever gets non-choppy playback throughout a whole movie
unless they just don't have a swap partition enabled (is this true?).

It'd be good to find out if I'm the only one experiencing these symptoms
(ie: I need to work on my system) or if everyone does (ie: I need to work on
VLC).

Any answers?

--
PhiloVivero


Rich Birch wrote:

> Hi Dave.
>
> No I didn't do anything in my xvideo config. Maybe the quality of mine now
> matches yours, but mine is a damn sight better than it was previously. I do
> still get jumps, but only small ones and a lot less frequently.
>
> Does vlc say 'xvideo' in the title of the playing window? Mine always said
> x11 previously, but now says xvideo, and sdl works too although for some
> reason it only fills half the screen when fullscreen is selected unless you
> set preferences for the windowed screen to the fullscreen size and then
> flick to fullscreen. There appears to be little difference between sdl and
> xvideo, but i'd say the sdl is slightly worse if anything.
>
> Rich
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Gómez" <davidge at jazzfree.com>
> To: <vlc at videolan.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 12:50 PM
> Subject: Re: Voodoo 3 working better
>
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Rich Birch wrote:
>
> > I guy replied to my post (i don't remember who) saying he had the same
> setup
>
> I'm the guy ;)
>
> > as me and had enabled xvideo but it was no better , but i thought i had
> > xvideo setup correctly as it appeared when i ran 'xdpyinfo'. However, i
> was
> > trying to get kingpin to work when i came across the DRI website, and
> since
> > following their instructions to get dri setup, xvideo output now works.
> >
> > So I'm quite happy now. Although perfection would always nice :-)
> >
>
> I would like to know if you did some special in your xvideo config. I have
> enabled xvideo, dri and vlc has good quality, but it's not smooth because
> every half second or so i notice leaps in the video stream.
>
> David Gómez
>
> "The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of
>  whether submarines can swim." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra