Jerky playback

[Jean-Paul Saman]

Chris Jensen wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I've got vlc running now with x11 output (the other two still segfault). But
> the playback is kind of choppy and I think sometimes the audio slides faster
> and slower causing the pitch of music being played to slide.
> It starts out dropping about every 10 or so frames but as I get to the end
> of a movie it seems to be more like every second frame.
> Looking at top as this happens, the cpu usage starts out at about 65% user
> but goes towards 75% user, and about 24% nice. Almost all of my 64 megs of
> memory is in use, and there are 4 vlc processes listed as using 25.1% of
> memory, and that grows to about 29% each.
> I'm playing on an AMD Athlon 750MHz, with a Riva TNT M64, so I would've
> thought this would be adequate to decode fast enough for full screen
> playback, the disc reading certainly isn't at maximum.

Try fiddling with hdparm to speed up the dvd:
c1	-enable 32 bit
a128	-read larger chunks in one row from your dvd drive sequentioally
d1	-enable dma
A1	-enable lookahead read

/sbin/hdparm -c1d1A1a128 /dev/dvd

You might want to use this together with: nice -n vlc --yuv yuv -V sdl
-I gnome 

Jean-Paul Saman