Jerky playback

[Jean-Paul Saman]

Chris Jensen wrote:
> 
> > Try fiddling with hdparm to speed up the dvd:
> > /sbin/hdparm -c1d1A1a128 /dev/dvd
> >
> These are already enabled, except for read ahead which gives the following
> error when I try to set it
> HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(setreadahead) failed: Input/output error
Did you try other values, lower in this case like 64, 32, 16 or 8 ?
Is DMA enabled ?

> 
> However I don't think it's a problem with reading from the drive, as I said
> the drive lights indicate it's only being accessed about 50-75% as much as
> it could be when playing. Also I have found that I am able to get very few
> frames dropped when playing in 16bpp depth.
> 
did you try to use --overlay?

> > You might want to use this together with: nice -n vlc --yuv yuv -V sdl
> > -I gnome
> 
> (you seem to have left out a nice value.
Oops, usually I do nice -n 0.

> I've tried various negative numbers
> but they don't seem to help, and sometimes actually increased the number of
> frames skipped)
> I doubt it would make any difference as there are no other processes active
> when I try to play the DVD, and the processor is already down to about 1% to
> 5% idle time. With 70% user time and 27% nice. This time is being taken up
> by X and two vlc processes.
Do you have the same behaviour with other DVD's?

> Also I can only use -V x11 as sdl and xvideo seg fault.
I always use SDL, but you need sdl-1.2.1 (als sdl_mixer and sdl_image
packages) or above for the latests vlc's. It gives me acceptable
playback. SDL can be found on www.libsdl.org