Jerky playback

[Jean-Paul Saman]

> 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.
vlc does not use hardware acceleration for mpeg streams. This has
nothing to do with your video output to the screen. Does your graphics
card use hardware acceleration? 

> > > 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)
As far as I know SDL and XVideo are two seperate things. On the other
hand it looks like you are missing one vital other library, like svgalib
(I use svgalib-1.4.1-13.i386.rpm) or another. I can't remember exactly
which libraries you need. 

Are you running a RH 7.x system? If so then recompiling vlc for your
machine will solve a lot or all of your troubles now. In RH7.x redhat
delivers compiler gcc-2.96 that is not compatible with other gcc
compilers. I noticed problems of this kind with vlc and recompilation
solved all me problems with vlc. The only thing is you need to find all
the libraries that are needed for compilation more or less by trial and
error. 

> 
> 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?
If your sound is in MPEG2, then --spdiff will not help you.     
vlc --help says '--spdif AC3 pass-through mode' and that is a sound
stream already decoded as far as I know.

Jean-Paul Saman