Multimedia Performance
Hi all,
I've got a question of performance that I was hoping some with more of a
feel for these things could help with.
Previously, I had been using Mandrake 7.1 on my desktop machine, an
Athlon 600. At first, I had performance problems with certain multimedia
applications: if I was playing an mp3 with mpg123, there would often be a
click when an X client popped up a new window. Playing mpeg video wasn't
so good, either. I applied Andre Hedrick's IDE patch and recompiled my
kernel with support for the AMD Viper, and things really improved. All of
the kinds of problems I just described completely disappeared. I could
even play 3 or 4 separate MPEG videos with plaympeg without noticing a
performance hit.
A few days ago, I installed potato, and things were again not so good. I
applied the IDE patch and compiled a kernel, and things improved, but
they're not as good as they were on Mandrake. I still get brief clicks in
my audio, and trying to play 3 videos at a time, they all drop frames and
the system response slows to a crawl. Strangely, plaympeg won't play in
full screen mode any more, either. Using xawtv to watch TV on my
bt878-based TV card isn't quite as good, either.
My question: could the difference be the pentium optimizations in the
Mandrake binaries? If so, what might be the key pieces of software that I
should recompile to get similar performance? If not, any ideas what the
difference might be?
Any help is sincerely apprecaited.
--
David Steinberg
steinber@interchange.ubc.ca
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