I occasionally use an elderly laptop to run DVDs or MP4s from a flash-drive. It is a Lenovo T60 Thinkpad, running Linux Mint Cinnamon 32 bit, with an Intel Core 2 CPU, 2GiB of RAM, and Mobility Radeon X1300 Graphics Card. I usually use VLC as a player.

In the last few months it has grown increasingly hesitant: the MP4s would freeze for a moment, and briefly look as if they were being presented in a very low resolution before carrying on. I was slow to realize the problem seemed to be getting worse, or too lazy to put time into trying to resolve it, and in any case the shows were still watchable.

However the last time I tried to watch a DVD (Ian McKellan's Acting Shakespeare, and I recommend it highly) it would only run for a few minutes before freezing, and then lurched from one freeze to another. The DVD ran well on another computer.

I made sure that I had libdvdcss2 and libdvdread4 and libdvdnav4 installed, and looked for extra codecs, which did not seem to make a difference. I also tried the laptop with Puppy Linux running from a flash-drive and still had difficulties with the DVD--but I felt they were greatly reduced.

All this would have had me assuming hardware failure, but when I plugged in a flash-drive with an elderly copy of the animated film Megamind, it ran fine.
So, what am I missing? Have codecs evolved or something this past year?

This statement confirms you have a hardware problem. If you plug in a different drive and you don't have problems then it is in the hardware you just replaced.

I am not sure this is what you intended to say.

The T60 is pretty old. My experience is that as ENcoders develop, old hardware gets more and more problems to play back. That is, you more often hit a newly encoded movie which does not playback well anymore.

So, a few tests to do. Download a movie which was encoded a decade ago. AVI. Does it run? Try the same with .MKV and .MP4 do the old ones run?

Then download a recently encoded .MKV or .MP4. Does it give problems.

It is not certain that it is right. But generally newer ENcoders are used with the newest settings by default.

I must say that DVDs (VTS_01_0.VOB) usually impose very low demands on system resources. They should play with you old hardware and old drivers.

jlinkels

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a few things in no particular order...

you say DVD - could it be the player itself?
do you have problems only with DVDs?
i hardly use them, but i think some of them use encryption more taxing on the system.

Is your Mint up-to-date?

VLC is not the lightest media player around.

I highly recommend mpv, and if you can't be without a GUI, i believe smplayer can use mpv as a backend.

all in all, in addition to the codecs resolution also matters. you really have to get the media information of both problematic and unproblematic video playback, and make comparisons.

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I was assuming that if an older film ran from a flash-drive it would demonstrate that there was not a hardware problem (except possibly the DVD player itself, of course). The film I ran without difficulty was in the .flv format.

I installed the mpv player and tried my DVD again, It seemed to run well at first, but then sgut down with the following message:

**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************
Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
- Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
- Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
- Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
- Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts,
e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
- Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
- Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
- Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

I am going to try to work my way through this advice, and I will borrow one or two older DVDs to see how they do, but it will take some time—tax time is looming!

Well, to make a good diagnosis:
- older film on external drive
- newer film on external drive
- older film on internal drive
- newer film on internal drive

I must say that the error message looks familiar, I have seen that when I was trying to play films on older hardware.

I have also noticed that it was not just processor speed but also GPU speed. Or, when the GPU could not execute the proper decoding I noticed that my processor usage was very high. In the latter case your graphic card is out of date and the driver does not support the latest decoding. If a newer video uses new encoding which cannot be executed by the GPU, the system will revert to decoding on your CPU. The processor load goes to 100% and the video can still not be decoded because the CPU lacks power. So what is your CPU load in the top command?

This all still does not preclude a hardware error somewhere. Unless you can prove that older videos play well.

On the bright side of this. I have spent money to upgrade my home video system. And now I am watching movies in satisfying resolution which take up only 1 to 1.5 GB. Whereas before quality could be abominable with 4GB file sizes.

jlinkels

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that is good advice, but my experience is that either graphics drivers are totally not working as supposed, or your computer really is too slow.
you should start collecting information about this systematically. you can use e.g. mediainfo to analyze video files, to get resolution and codec at least. my hunch is that when you start comparing, you will quickly realize which hang and which don't.

1. As stated if anything it maybe the data within the files due to advancements in tech. They add more "crap" to make it look prettier. Therefore one needs more processing power to display it. The cache maybe getting backed up so it slows it down. etc..

(Re-sampling (handbrake) to get some of the extra data out of it to make it more manageable to an older CPU may help)

2. USB Stick old worn out.

3. USB Ports old worn out.

Hi Brant,

I used to use really old hardware (especially vintage Thinkpads, going all the way back to the 380 series and the 600E and 600X ...) to do all sorts of things, including watch video. A couple of comments:

- Updates to your linux system can actually cause problems, as modern versions of librairies and drivers sometimes drop support for old hardware. This happened to me with a T30 Thinkpad when xorg dropped support for the Savage display chipset it used. Just be aware that you may have to freeze your system config at a point in time when everything was functioning optimally.

- Of all the advice that mpv is spitting out at you, the area that has yielded results for me in the past is the use of the "cache" parameter. Boosting this to as high as you can, depending on the amount of RAM the rest of your running system needs, may help.

- Mint is not a light distro ... I know you've tried Puppy from USB, but perhaps installing a more lightweight distro on the T60 would increase its longevity. If you do this, be careful to choose a distro that is forgiving of old hardware ... several specialize in this area and members here can guide you accordingly ... I know of AntiX, Puppy version "Classic 2.14x" ...

Cheers - let us know how things go !

I read all the above, and it seemed changing the cache settings was the simplest place to start, and then found this:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...f-video-files/

And bingo: advancing the caching value to 1000 seems to have solved the problem. I hope—I have not yet had many chances to put it to the test!

Many thanks to everyone who helped with this!