[CLUE-Talk] DVD Playback

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Dave Price (davep at kinaole.org) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I tried running DVD movies thru my linux box for the first time with
> questionable results.
> 
> I was able to get output from both xine and ogle easily; but both apps
> had a lot of skips in the video.
> 
> I am running a p-iii 550 w/ 384mb RAM and using a phillips atapi dvd
> drive.  I have activated DMA on the dvd drive.
> 
> Is this enough 'hardware' to expect good results?
> 
> What kind of hardware should I need to get excellent results?
> 
> Any advice on other players that would make use of modest hardware?
> 

Your hardware is probably OK, but you most likely don't have DMA enabled
for your DVD drive.  Check out the man page for hdparm.  The option you
are most interested in is 'd', but 'c' might have been helpful, too.  I
can't remember if 32 bit stuff helped, or even applied, when I did it.
It be as easy as:

hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdX (replace x as appropriate).

If you happen to be accessing your ATAPI device through generic SCSI,
you are out of luck, if you really need the generic scsi for some reason.
If you have an actual SCSI drive, I am not sure what you would do.  The
above is for EIDE/ATAPI.

You could also try NICEing the DVD reader process up (which probably
means running it at root, or at least logging in a root to do that), if
the machine is busy.  That would give the DVD a better chance of getting
CPU time, but then again, if the box were busy, I doubt it would be used
to play DVDs. :-)

HTH,

Tim
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== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
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