I've been struggling unsuccessfully with getting smooth DVD playback through Xine for the last few weeks. From my experience, Xine is the best all round media player, particularly for DVD. So what could be causing the choppy playback?

Suse 9.0
1 gig RAM
2.8gh P4
SB Audigy 2 Platinum
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

Thanks all

You may need to set DMA on with 'hdparm -d1 /dev/hd?' if it's not set - that helped some in Gentoo, though I use mplayer. That operates on the drive - I'm just saying xine may have other issues. Those specs should have *no* problem with video as such, though.

What does the hdparm do?

Hehe ~ I know it shouldn't. That's what worries me ;o)

Is Mplayer better for playback? I always found it to be a pain with Win32 codecs.

digiot is probably right about hdparm. I had to do the same thing before getting smooth DVD playback in any player - mplayer even used to complain that my machine is too slow for DVD playback... What the hdparm does is set the way the system accesses the data. DMA is a lot faster (don't know much about how it works though).

Okay ~ Which hda do I want to use it on?

hdparm -d1 /dev/hd?

Well, assuming IDE on secondary master, it'd be /dev/hdc. Might be /dev/hdd - try 'dmesg | grep -i dvd' or something like.

As far as which to use, it's up to you. I just never really liked xine for some reason but didn't spend enough time with it to say what it can or can't do, I guess. Mplayer was just more versatile to me. It can be tricky to set up though and I don't even recall exactly how I did it. There is a big codec tarball to grab and I think I just untarred that - maybe messed with a config file or something.

Exactly quatsch - 'machine too slow'. Erm, not the fastest box on earth but I don't think it's *that* slow.

Okay ~ It was hdc for me. Will this setting stay like this or will I need to keep doing it per boot up?

No, it'll reset. I'm not sure the best way to make it permanent. Probably just set the command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local, I suppose. This sucks... it seems to be set automatically in Slack, but I don't know how. Seems to be a kernel config based on grepping the file. So maybe next time you recompile your kernel you can include it that way.

-- Well, assuming SuSE has rc.local. I don't know how SuSE works.

At least for suse 8.2 there is an easy option in YaST Control Center (Hardware/IDE DMA Mode) to set DMA to on as default mode.

I watch my DVDs using VideoLAN with CPU of only 381Megs. The drive is a Plexor Model PX504A and OS is Fedora.

right and it works like a charm

Suse 9.0 has the same feature.

How can I use this hdparm to optimize my performance? It looks like it speeds everything up...

for hdparrm.... take a gander at the man page for hdparm ( man hdparm )....

also, if your dvd playback is choppy, make sure your video driver settings are correct. I was having loads of trouble until i realized that my video driver was set to VESA (yuck). Once i switched to the right driver it was smooth sailing