i use xine to watch movies but the problem is that in the fullscreen mode the frames tend to move slowly, if i resize the window to make it smaller the movie has more clarity, has it got to do with the refresh rates of my monitor or my resolution settings ,pls help

What kind of video card do you have? it may not be powerfull enough for fullscreen video at high resolutions. If it is indeed not powerfull enough some solutions are to use a lower resolution, or play less intensive video formats like mpeg1, and of course you can close all uneeded programs and daemons. If you have a good enough card then you may need to change the video driver used by xine, recompile xine, or change your video driver for a better one.

do you have DMA and 32bit support enabled ?

linux does not do this by default

if not search this site for hdparm posts and choppy dvd playback posts

I have Riva TNT 2 32 MB Video Card

32bit support and DMA are for the hard drive and cd-rom drive

this may be the reason why you're experiencing problems

open up a terminal, su to root and type the following

hdparm -d /dev/hda (if hda is your linux drive)

if it reports back that DMA is off
then type

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

this will turn DMA on

repeat the process for cd-drives

if you get a "cannot turn DMA on, action not permitted" message when trying to turn on DMA on a cd-drive then you need to add the following lines to the /etc/modules.conf file and then reboot

options hdc-cd dma=1

this takes care of DMA

repeat above process but replace d with c

hdparm -c /dev/hda

to check whether 32bit support is on or off

hdparm -c1 /dev/hda turns it on

all this can be done automatically on boot by adding the following lines to /etc/rc.local

/sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
/sbin/hdparm -c1 /dev/hda

and so on

reboot after these lines are added

doing this on my machine has made full screen DVD's a reliable experience with Linux

I had choppy video using xine and dma was set on the drive as well as the hard disk. The thing I had to do to get proper video was to set it to 32-bit also. I used hdparm -c1 /dev/dvd as root and it worked straight away. Mandrake Linux 9.0 sets dma to on as default but 32-bit as off so 16-bit.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by salparadise
[B]

if you get a "cannot turn DMA on, action not permitted" message when trying to turn on DMA on a cd-drive then you need to add the following lines to the /etc/modules.conf file and then reboot

options hdc-cd dma=1

this takes care of DMA


I have been trying to optimize xine for hours and I have reached the point where I need to do this. But I do not know how to add a line to /etc/modules.conf file. Would you be kind enough to explain it. Also, /dev/hdd is the drive I need to turn on dma for. So would the line be:

options hdd dma=1 ?