I like Ubuntu a lot better then SUSE. I go back and forth between the two so much, it's almost sad!

What's holding me back is a problem I have with MPlayer in Ubuntu. I get really choppy streams. Both the picture and the sound lag. It drives me crazy. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

Thanks.

hello


firstly , what video card is on you computer is it a standard one or one of those intergrated nightmares!!! ( i know i have one!!! )



The video overlay extension is a very poorly documented standard feature and is absolutely essential for high quality video playback under Linux. It is the only type of hardware playback acceleration that is widely supported in Linux, and it is by far the single most important configuration element for DVD playback on a Linux system.

To check if you have this extension, type

xvinfo

in an X terminal.

If the command returns several screens full of important-looking output, then congratulations, you have hardware video overlay and you need not worry about it anymore.

hope this help let me know how you get on..


Mike

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I recall when this were all fields and pasties were 3 for't pound !!

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I have an nVidia Geforce FX (128 MB). Yeah, I agree. Integrated graphics are crap.

Yep. I got a long list of text like you said. Guess it's supported. What do I do from here?

Thanks for the reply!
-Richie (AKA BarfBag)

ok great now we need to know what soundcard you have as choppy sound is often due to soundcards that do not support 48 kHz audio playback.

Failing that, you can lighten the load on your sound playback system by not using a sound daemon such as ESounD or aRts and playing the DVD audio directly to the OSS driver.


To do this with MPlayer, run

mplayer -ao=oss

along with whatever other options you normally use.


Another problem is often that DMA is not enabled on your dvd drive

You can tell that DMA is broken if using the command

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda ( or wotever your dvd device is ! )


If your DVD drive returns a message like the following:

dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

then you will need to enable dma on your dvd drive - not 100% sure how u do this though - sorrry!!

this is about all i can think of sadly , let me know how you get on!

Mike

Thank you! It works perfectly now!

Already enabled DMA.

I owe you a beer.