Re: all video players dropping frames when playing dvd's
On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 23:24:37 -0700, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I hadn't played a movie on any of my computers for 2 or 3 months, and tried
> to play one today as I had enough time to watch one. What I found is that
> movies that used to play very well on my laptop and my workstations will
> not play at all anymore. They drop frames so badly that the players, vlc,
> totem, and mplayer, all crash. The audio plays at varying speeds and drops
> frames/skips too.
> The other thing I found was that dvd's that I had copied to disk no longer
> play. Totem used to read .iso files and play them just as if it was
> reading off a dvd disk. Now Totem says it is missing a plugin and can't
> read them. VLC and Mplayer used to read those same .iso files and play
> back the movies very smoothly. Now they crash trying to play them.
> I used to play movies with 2-3% cpu usage at full screen, and the picture
> was crystal clear and the sound great. Now cpu usage is at 30-40%, and as
> I said, nothing plays worth a damn.
> What has happened to the ability to play movies in the last couple of
> months? If it was only one of my computers I'd be thinking it had a
> problem, but it's not. It's all of my computers. I haven't done anything
> to them other than just keep on updating them as I run Sid on all them.
> Is anyone else experiencing this same thing? It looks to me as if
> something has undergone a major change, but what?
The missing plugins/codecs might be due to a package being uninstalled
because of a (temporary?) dependency problem. (That can happen with
Sid.) Check your dpkg/apitude logs for suspicious activity. Try to get
totem to give you a more accurate error message (which plugin is it?)
and search apt's cache for packages that have related terms in their
package description.
The high CPU load and dropped frames during playback may indicate a
regression in your video driver or a problem with DMA for hard disk and
DVD access. My guess would be that it is the video driver. We need more
information about your graphics card and your Xorg configuration to be
sure, though. For a start, please post the output of the following
commands:
lspci | egrep -i 'graphic|display|vga|video'
awk '/Section "(Module|Device|DRI|Extensions)"/,/EndSection/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
egrep '^\((EE|WW)\)' /var/log/Xorg.0.log
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
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