Jerky playback

[Chris Jensen]

> > > /sbin/hdparm -c1d1A1a128 /dev/dvd
> Did you try other values, lower in this case like 64, 32, 16 or 8 ?
I've tried 128 and 8 and there seems to be little difference

> Is DMA enabled ?
Yes, here's the current settings
 I/O support  =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  1 (on)
 readahead    = 128 (on)

>
> did you try to use --overlay?
That's improved it a bit, I've now got a bit better performance under 16 bpp
(up to 20% idle cpu sometimes). But 24 bpp seems to run worse, than if i
don't use --overlay
I'm surprised I had to do that though, I would've thought it would make more
sense to have hardware acceleration turned on by default and have an option
to turn it off if necissary.

> usually I do nice -n 0.
That doesn't seem to have changed it noticably

> > 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?
Yes, I've tested it on The Negotiator, Ghost Busters and The Princess Bride.

> > 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
I read in another thread that SDL uses xvideo where available, so if xvideo
is seg faulting, then would that be why sdl also seg faults (they both seg
fault at the same place)

Also, while I was looking at those options I also noticed --spdif. I gave
that a try thinking it might reduce the load the audio is placing on the
machine, but it just seemed to disable the audio, what is it supposed to do?

Thanks for you're help

Chris Jensen