Re: DVD playing slow -- dropping frames?

[csj <csj@zapo.net>]

On 30. November 2003 at 8:15PM -0500,
Nori Heikkinen <nori@sccs.swarthmore.edu> wrote:

> [1  <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>]
> on Mon, 01 Dec 2003 08:50:10AM +0800, csj insinuated:
> > On 30. November 2003 at 4:03PM -0800,
> > John <bagdanof@comcast.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 05:27:46PM -0500, Nori Heikkinen wrote:
> > > > i'm trying to play DVDs.  i should have the hardware for it --
> > > > an AMD Duron 950 MHz; an ATI rage fury pro video card; 512M of
> > > > RAM.  but, xine and ogle both appear to be dropping frames.
> > 
> > Aside from the DMA issues, it's quite possible you're running the
> > ATI Rage Pro using the "default" unaccelarated X video driver.  To
> > get hardware accelerated video you need to use "xv" (X Video
> > Extension).  Is xv enabled for your card?  This might not be the
> > case if you're using only the official Debian X packages.
> > 
> > To check:
> > 
> > $ xvinfo | grep -i adaptor
> 
> orange:~> xvinfo | grep -i adaptor
>  no adaptors present

There's your problem.  Xine is rendering your DVD's using xshm,
which is processor intensive.  To get xv you need an acclerated
Rage xserver.  If I'm not mistaken the ATI Rage uses a Mach64
chip.  A Debian maintainer has unofficial mach64 xserver packages
available at a fairly official site:

http://people.debian.org/~daenzer/dri-mach64-sid/
http://people.debian.org/~daenzer/dri-mach64/

> > Xine also comes with a nice utilitly called "xine-check" which
> > should give you more comprehensive diagnostics, and other likely
> > suspects including MTRR (or is it MTTR?).
> 
> hm, i don't see it in apt-cache search ...

Maybe it's already installed:

$ dpkg -S xine-check
xine-ui: /usr/share/man/man1/xine-check.1.gz
xine-ui: /usr/bin/xine-check
xine-ui: /usr/share/man/de/man1/xine-check.1.gz

> > > > that same thread also suggests that this might be a DMA
> > > > issue (which VERA seems to define as "digital memory
> > > > access").  how can i enable
> > > 
> > > You are sooo close!  man hdparm & enable dma on your dvd
> > > player.
> > 
> > You can also try the echo > /proc trick:
> > 
> > # echo using_dma:1 > /proc/ide/hdX/settings
> > 
> > where "hdX" stands for the ide name of your presumably IDE
> > DVD-ROM drive.  Also works if your drive is under SCSI
> > emulation, although I haven't tried this under devfs.
> 
> looks like i (a) already have this enabled for /dev/hdc (which
> is my dvd device):
> 
> orange:~# hdparm /dev/hdc
> 
> /dev/hdc:
>  HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Input/output error
>  IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
>  unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
>  using_dma    =  1 (on)
>  keepsettings =  0 (off)
>  readonly     =  0 (off)
>  BLKRAGET failed: Input/output error
>  HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument
> 
> 
> and, that line you suggested (at least, a version of that) seems to
> already be in there:
> 
> using_dma               1               0               1 rw

Which leads me to conclude that your card's (current) lack of xv
support is the culprit.  Either get a new card ($'s) or attempt
to install the appropriate accelerated video card drivers.