Multimedia Performance Solved
On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Philipp Schulte wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 12:16:52AM -0800, David Steinberg wrote:
> > 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...
> >From all I have heard the missing pentium optimizations shouldn't make
> much difference.
> You should check if your HD is working in UDMA-mode
> $hdparm /dev/hda
> because this is what the patch is ment for.
Hi all,
I just thought I'd report my conclusion on this matter, in case anyone
experiences something similar. I checked the disk access speed
(using hdparm) under my potato installation and compared it to that of my
Mandrake installation. Under potato, it was actually slightly better
(improvements in the 2.2.18 kernel compared to the 2.2.16 kernel that I'm
using in my Mandrake installation, perhaps?). So, I decided the problem
was more likely in user space. I was going to use strace to figure out
what libraries were being used and then compare the versions of mpg123 and
any supporting libraries in the two installations. Well, the first thing
I noticed was that libesd was being used in Mandrake, but not in debian.
I had never even realized that that was an option of mpg123! Also,
Mandrake was using mpg123 0.59r, while potato was using mpg123 0.59q
(although, esd support has been in mpg123 since 0.59p).
Well, I quickly looked at the mpg123 packages, and there was none in
potato with esd support. Before compiling my own, I checked in woody,
and, low and behold: mpg123-esd (version 0.59r, no less)!
I installed that version, and audio is now smooth as a baby's bottom. I'm
not exactly sure why it's so much better with esd...can anyone enlighten
(pardon the pun) me? Is it a faster implimentation, or does it somehow
demand higher priority?
Anyways, needless to say, I'm a very happy camper. And I'm ready to
switch over to debian full time and reclaim some hard drive space. :)
--
David Steinberg
steinber@interchange.ubc.ca
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