I've been trying to figure this one out since winter. Suddenly, it seems, when playing a dvd every 5-7 minutes a few video frames skip, only for a couple seconds. Sound isn't affected at all. It's not bad, not unwatchable choppy, but enough that it's annoying. For example when Bruce Lee is doing a flying kick he might appear to pause in midair.

It started while I had Slackware 11 installed and I use Xine as my player. I don't remember what versions of xine-lib and xine-ui I was using when it started, but I was keeping up with all the patched versions. I waited until Slackware 12 and with xine-lib-1.1.7 and xine-ui-0.99.5 it still happens. I also tried mplayer. Video clips, such as avi and mpeg files, play fine, it's just dvds.

I have used hdparm to enable udma2 for the drive. In fact if I turn dma off it does become unwatchably bad. I have another computer setup with all the same versions of Slackware and all other packages and it happens there, too. CDs, installation discs for example, don't have any problems reading so I don't think it's a hardware problem. At least I hope not.

Any suggestions of what else I might try?

Have 2 machines here where xine and gxine did the same thing. I had to play with the buffer for the player till I got it right and manually set it to use opengl and select my compression utility. Sorry I don't remember EXACTLY what I did to fix it but am sure it is a setting error.

Thanks for the reply. It's helpful to know I'm not the only one having such a problem. I had tried different output options, and the most that changed was the mouse cursor would float behind the window instead of above it. I had also run it from a xterm window to watch for messages. I forgot to mention earlier, all of my dvds are originals, no bootlegs or copies, and I keep my discs in excellent condition.

I just finished uninstalling the xine-lib tgz and compiling xine-lib from source. I put it off because I was waiting for Slackware 12 to see if something in the upgrade would fix it. So far the newly-compiled xine seems ok now. I played the first 12 minutes of a dvd with no skips or jitters. The same disc last night was experiencing jitters in the first 3 minutes. I'll try more later. I'm thinking the precompiled binaries have a problem with the codecs, maybe the version or the source where I got the tgz from.

Don't see any problems in slackware 12(Just watched my 1st dvd since the new install hehhe. May have been a bad tgz file.

Glad you got it working though

I know it's been a while but I've been testing it some more. It seems that, for me anyway, it happens when I use a particular wireless driver, madwifi. I just played a full movie while using my ndiswrapper-driven card instead of madwifi and it was smooth 'til the end. Before that I was getting the video stutter while using my atheros-based card. I may just have to save the atheros card as a spare. This won't be the first time I've linked a glitch to a particular driver.