More of a question and advise than a problem!
I have a Shuttle PC (Nforce 400FSB motherboard) and a Duron 800Mhz processor.
Recently I have managed to get DVD movies to play but they tend to jump and skip frames with all DVD movies I play.
My specs are 800Mhz Duron, Geforce 4 MX video board, 512MB RAM (running at 200Mhz due to the Duron), 16X DVD ROM (brand new).
Can someone please advise, should this spec be able to run DVD effortlessly?
Thanks

Simon

what application are you using to play the DVD's.

I am using both kaffeine and xine, neither are any better at it!!!
Thanks

Simon

well kaffeine uses xine libs so any problem with xine will result ina problem with kaffeine. Try installing win32 codecs from mplayer's and installing them in /usr/lib/win32. If that doesn't work and you are running an rpm based distro, uninstall xine and xine-lib (or libxine) and install the ones from the xine nightly builds page including libdvdcss and thier win32 codecs.

A computer slower than 1 GHz will not perform well with videos and DVD in Linux because programs were not plan to be efficient for slow processors. The Linux community is trying hard to make the programs have a huge tolerance to play many audio/video codecs and formats. Linux programs lack performance to play the video or DVD. Either the program lacks fifo or the cache algorithms suck. I have an AMD Athlon 700 Mhz and I have to live with pops, clicks, and running audio from frames in many video players even though I did as much tweaking as a I can to minmize those annoying problems.

You can try to enable DMA for your DVD. Use SCSI emulation to help your DVD to cache some data which is a bad way to work around caching CD/DVD drives. Use the latest 2.4.x kernel version and enable the low latency option located in the /proc directory. Tweak the virtual memory and filesystem settings in the kernel parameters. Include the video card, sound, chipset, filesystem in the kernel instead of compiling them as modules. Try using lite Desktop/Window Managers like XFCE, iceWM, Blackbox, fluxbox.

I don't agree with that point, an 800mhz processor should be able to play DVD's without any problems. I know some people who are playing DVD's on old amd 500mhz processors absolutely fine.

i have a p3-500, asus p3c-2000 mobo, 512mb ram... i have same dvd drive & geforce4 mx 440 video card. i haven't been able to enable dma mode on it (yet), hdparm returns that it doesn't support this drive, but i can bump the xfer speeds on my lite-on dvd rom, and my hard drives.

but rest assured, you can get this running fine without such tweaks as electro states... my playback is flawless. i had a playback issue until i updated my video drivers from nvidia for my geforce4... now the playback is nice!!! you will notice that once you get the nvidia drivers, that switching from X back to bash can yield some pretty funky text... impossible to read. but if you run X all the time, its no big loss. switch to runlevel 3 when u need bash outside X's konsole.

i use xine, and mplayer... both work just fine on mandrake 9.2's 2.4 kernel...

on top of my pioneer burner, i also have a lite-on dvd rom for my ripping needs :] it plays back fine as well since updating my video drivers.

you might also want to make sure 32-bit dma mode is enabled on your hard drives for cache back... but check to see that ur not using the default linux video drivers.

try this for hard drives:
$ hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda

try this for cd/dvd drives:
$ hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -c3 /dev/hdd

again, the pioneer-108 is recognized as scsi cd, so hdparm won't work on it.

just my $0.02 -- i'm no expert.

Jiggs

I use Totem for playing DVD's in Slack 10. It just needs libdvdread and libdvdcss libraries to play DVD's. I have no problems at all with it on my old Dell Inspiron 5000 (500MHz P3).