I have been trying for several months to play DVDs on my linux box with little success. When I started i was a total newbie so since then i have made a few discoveries and understand much better.

So. I have a Dell Latitude 400Mhz 128Mb with a Neomagic AV256 card. I am trying to play DVD's with mplayer which is installed and configured correctly. i can run x11 with some success but performance is poor

I was trying to play DVDs in xfree 4.3, which has support for XV with neomagic cards but it also says in the mplayer read me that a patch to speed up frame buffer ops would be in the next release. the mplayer manual reccommends you add the option:

Option "OverlayMem" "829440"

to increase the memory available to the video card. but i was still getting a crash and this error when using -vo xv

BadAlloc: insuffcient resources

i recently discovered from a xine FAQ page that this error is due to the video card having little or no memory and adding several things to Xfree-config were reccommended:

Option "XaaNoPixmapCache"

I added this under the screen section but i am not sure that is right

and it also recommended using a lower res or colour depth - i cannot use a lower res on my screen cos it is a TFT and i get black borders with any other res.

so, to the last bit. i have now upgraded to the lastest x.org packages to replace xfree 4.3 which as far as i am aware should contain this new speedy framebuffer patch - i just check the log to see what was what and was surprised to see this:

(II) NEOMAGIC(0): Can not reserve 829440 bytes for overlay. Resize to 261120 bytes.

this might explain where i have been going wrong all along but i dunno what to try now

please help me cos i have no exhausted all my ideas

so dga and sdl don't work either?

and 400mhz is borderline for playing a dvd.

they are not even options - works fine in windows most of the time - gets a bit sketchy sometimes

the overlay mem option is specifically suggested by xfree to address this prob - but it doesn't work it seems

i also know that acceleration is enabled on this card for all video res - may i shoudl decrease the depth?

is your dvd drive is running dma mode?

decreasing the screen res does use less cpu. i have a bunch of low res screens set up for playing movies and stuff on my machine. they use less cpu than -fs -zoom does.

how can i check if dma is on?

if the dvd drive is /dev/hdc
hdparm /dev/hdc

dma on - any other ideas?

overclock the video card a little. i don't know how dangerous that is, but i would on a desktop.
you can try the hard frame drop option with mplayer, and a lower resolution.