Poor DVD, DVB performance

phyrko · 03-03-2007, 10:04 PM

Hi, I am running an FC5 box with 1.25GB of RAM and an Athlon 2400. I can't imagine that this would come under the category of a low spec'ed machine but I have had issues with the performance for some time.

The problem seems to come whenever I want to do anything involving video playback: when I try to play a DVD with ogle I get jerky video; when I try to play a DVD with Xine I get 'too many frames dropped' errors; watching digital TV with mplayer is a painful experience due to long channel tuning time.

Admittedly I have Azureus running in the background which eats around 4% of CPU time but as my flatmate keeps cajoling me - these things would run fine on that system with another, less free OS. I certainly am not going to revert to that sort of extreme measure but it disappoints me that I haven't been able to at least replicate the performance of a windoze machine.

What am I doing wrong? Is it because I use rpms and not apps compiled from source? Is it because of the X Server architecture? If I was to upgrade to FC6 tomorrow, what measures should I take to ensure that I maxed out the performance (video or otherwise) of the machine?

Hope to hear some suggestions!

Thanks

cvt · 03-04-2007, 05:13 AM

Can't think of anything off-hand, but it could be a direct rendering thing maybe?

try...

Code:

glxinfo | grep info

You should see something like this...

Code:

cvt[~]$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
cvt[~]$

If it comes up as 'no' then you'll need to check your display driver situation.

snowtigger · 03-04-2007, 06:27 AM

It may not necessarily be if you have direct rendering on or off. But do you have your video card correctly configured.

What video card do you have, and what is your X config using?

phyrko · 03-04-2007, 07:34 AM

OK, thanks!

My video card is an nvidia Geforce MX400. Here is the output:

Code:

$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes

and from xorg.conf:

Code:

Section "Module"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "fbdevhw"
	Load  "record"
	Load  "freetype"
	Load  "type1"
	Load  "glx"
EndSection

.
.
.

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "nvidia"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName   "NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX (generic)"
	Option	    "TwinView"
	Option	    "TwinViewOrientation" "Clone"
	Option	    "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-50"
	Option	    "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "60"
	Option	    "MetaModes" "1024x768, 1024x768"
	Option	    "TVStandard" "PAL-I"
	Option	    "TVOutFormat" "SCART"
EndSection

I do see the nvidia splash screen on X initialisation. There is one irregularity I can spot in xorg.conf which is multiple instances of the line

Code:

### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:

in the monitor section. I never put them there but the monitor seems to work fine.

snowtigger · 03-04-2007, 08:36 AM

There are a few things you can try.

1, Try different colour depths.

2, Try different resolutions.

3, Manually set refresh rates, but keep it comfortable for your eyes. And so it does not damage your monitor.

4, For xine check to see what video driver it is trying to use. xv gives best performance (in my experience).

5, Do you have xv working. run 'xvinfo' and see if any adaptors show up. If it says no adaptors then you will want to find out why.

6, Try different resolutions for the outputs for twinview. If i'm reading your config correctly then you are try to use 1024x768, which is pointless for a TV.

iamnothere · 03-04-2007, 01:14 PM

Yeah, you certainly want a functioning xvideo extension for watching tv. Without xvideo, you might be dropping back to x11 output. Your hardware is more than up to the task for watching tv, even fullscreen at something like 1280x1024 32-bit shouldn't be a problem. I don't think your basic X configuration is the problem (resolutions etc), it's more likely that xvideo isn't working for some reason, or maybe you have a buggy nvidia driver. Try a few different versions (drop back to an older one if you using the latest), some of them have various random performance problems.

Quote:

watching digital TV with mplayer is a painful experience due to long channel tuning time.

You can cut down on this time somewhat with the -nocache option. By default, mplayer caches a few seconds of video.

I doubt compiling from source would make much difference (no harm in trying though), since the rpm builds are probably optimized anyway (though, you could certainly cut down of the size of mplayer by leaving out the cruft you don't need, but that would be unlikely to affect performace significantly).

phyrko · 03-05-2007, 06:15 PM

Here is the output from xvinfo:

Code:

$ xvinfo | grep Adaptor
  Adaptor #0: "NV17 Video Texture"
  Adaptor #1: "NV05 Video Blitter"

Quote:

You can cut down on this time somewhat with the -nocache option. By default, mplayer caches a few seconds of video.

I tried this when I was doing some preliminary investigations. Didn't help much though.

Quote:

1, Try different colour depths.

2, Try different resolutions.

3, Manually set refresh rates, but keep it comfortable for your eyes. And so it does not damage your monitor.

I am pretty sure the hardware I have should be OK at these settings. This would really be a last resort!

Quote:

4, For xine check to see what video driver it is trying to use. xv gives best performance (in my experience).

For some reason xine has stopped working since I ran xine-config I will have to look into that later but I can tell you that mplayer is using the xv driver.

Quote:

6, Try different resolutions for the outputs for twinview. If i'm reading your config correctly then you are try to use 1024x768, which is pointless for a TV.

The TV is running in clone mode; won't this affect the monitor resolution?

Quote:

or maybe you have a buggy nvidia driver.

I will try different driver versions and see if there is any improvement. I think I may be on my second driver version since these problems started, though.

Here is some output from ogle that might be related. (Or it might not!)

Code:

$ ogle
libdvdread: Error cracking CSS key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_05_1.VOB (0x0037fed8)!!
xscreensaver-command not found.
WARNING[ogle_vout]: req_code: 141
WARNING[ogle_vout]: minor_code: 14
WARNING[ogle_vout]: error_code: 8
WARNING[ogle_vout]: XV_COLORKEY not available
ERROR[ogle_vout]: Couldn't get attribute: XV_COLORKEY
WARNING[ogle_mpeg_vs]: wrong start_code picture_start_code: 00000110
WARNING[ogle_mpeg_vs]: wrong start_code picture_start_code: 00000110
WARNING[ogle_mpeg_vs]: wrong start_code picture_start_code: 00000111
No accelerated IMDCT transform found
#ERROR[ogle_audio]: drain failed: Resource temporarily unavailable
ERROR[ogle_audio]: alsa state: 3
ERROR[ogle_audio]: prepare failed: Device or resource busy
ERROR[ogle_audio]: alsa state: 3
ERROR[ogle_audio]: Trying to close/reopen alsa device: default

Thanks again.

iamnothere · 03-06-2007, 02:35 PM

Quote:

I tried this when I was doing some preliminary investigations. Didn't help much though.

Yeah, helps a bit, but the bulk of the time seems to be the dvb driver tuning to the station. Not sure why it takes so long.

Quote:

The TV is running in clone mode; won't this affect the monitor resolution?

Yes, it will, if you're in clone mode, but you don't need to fiddle with your resolution anyway, your hardware is more than capable for watching dvb fullscreen even at higher resolutions than you're using.