Re: mplayer / xine does not show DVDs smoothly on 8.2

Ulrich Guenther wrote:
> Under SuSE 8.2 neither xine nor mplayer runs DVDs smoothly.
> 
> This is clearly a kernel problem. Under the old kernel (2.4.19) everything was 
> fine. Unfortunately SuSE 8.2 can't build the old kernel with gcc 3.3 
> (pre-release).
> 
> Was anybody able t watch movies under SuSE 8.2?

I have used xine and MPlayer successfully under 8.2. Both take a little 
extra setup for dvdcss and AC3 to work.

I found ogle best of all: I compiled it myself. I can send a log of how 
I compiled it if that is useful. I have no problem running DVDs 
fullscreen 1284x1024 with 6 channel sound.

If the DVD does not run smoothly, the first thing to check is how fast 
the DVD is being read. Use
# less /var/log/boot.msg
to check how the DVD player is set up. Mine has the following:

Setting up IDE DMA mode
/dev/hdc:
  setting using_dma to 1 (on)
  setting xfermode to 66 (UltraDMA mode2)
  using_dma    =  1 (on)
done

This is actually faster than under SuSE 8.0. This is set up in 
/etc/init.d/boot.idedma, which can be enabled in YaST->System->Runlevel 
Editor and normally runs only at boot time.

If you don't have this set up, look at
# man hdparm
and xine docomentation to see how you can enable dma.

You should also check that nothing else is running that will poll the 
DVD. For example, I think one of the KDE CD applications tries to read 
the DVD drive at regular intervals. If you have something like this 
switched on, you will get regular blips in the DVD playback.

-- 
JDL

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