I'm using suse 10 oss and video playback in kaffeine, xine, totem and mplayer is jumpy. Every 20 seconds or so the picture pauses for about 1/2 a second then resumes....sound is fine during this. The effect seems to get worse if the player is full screen. I had no trouble with this in suse 9.3.

I am playing files from my harddrive which has dma enabled.

First, make sure that DMA is enabled for your drives (man hdoparm, and search the board for any of the many threads covering DMA support and hdparm)

Second, make sure that you're running the correct X server and not the generic VESA server. Can you repost the output of xdpyinfo here?

Sorry for the late response.

I have DMA running on my hard-drive. As for the output of xdpyinfo:

name of display: :0.0
version number: 11.0
vendor string: The X.Org Foundation
vendor release number: 60900000
X.Org version: 6.9.0
maximum request size: 16777212 bytes
motion buffer size: 256
bitmap unit, bit order, padding: 32, LSBFirst, 32
image byte order: LSBFirst
number of supported pixmap formats: 7
supported pixmap formats:
depth 1, bits_per_pixel 1, scanline_pad 32
depth 4, bits_per_pixel 8, scanline_pad 32
depth 8, bits_per_pixel 8, scanline_pad 32
depth 15, bits_per_pixel 16, scanline_pad 32
depth 16, bits_per_pixel 16, scanline_pad 32
depth 24, bits_per_pixel 32, scanline_pad 32
depth 32, bits_per_pixel 32, scanline_pad 32
keycode range: minimum 8, maximum 255
focus: window 0x2c00007, revert to PointerRoot
number of extensions: 26
BIG-REQUESTS
DAMAGE
DOUBLE-BUFFER
DPMS
Extended-Visual-Information
LBX
MIT-SCREEN-SAVER
MIT-SHM
MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD
RANDR
RENDER
SECURITY
SHAPE
SYNC
TOG-CUP
X-Resource
XC-APPGROUP
XC-MISC
XFIXES
XFree86-Bigfont
XFree86-Misc
XFree86-VidModeExtension
XInputExtension
XKEYBOARD
XTEST
XVideo
default screen number: 0
number of screens: 1

screen #0:
print screen: no
dimensions: 1024x768 pixels (347x260 millimeters)
resolution: 75x75 dots per inch
depths (7): 24, 1, 4, 8, 15, 16, 32
root window id: 0x3c
depth of root window: 24 planes
number of colormaps: minimum 1, maximum 1
default colormap: 0x20
default number of colormap cells: 256
preallocated pixels: black 0, white 16777215
options: backing-store NO, save-unders NO
largest cursor: 64x64
current input event mask: 0xfa4031
KeyPressMask EnterWindowMask LeaveWindowMask
KeymapStateMask StructureNotifyMask SubstructureNotifyMask
SubstructureRedirectMask FocusChangeMask PropertyChangeMask
ColormapChangeMask
number of visuals: 2
default visual id: 0x21
visual:
visual id: 0x21
class: TrueColor
depth: 24 planes
available colormap entries: 256 per subfield
red, green, blue masks: 0xff0000, 0xff00, 0xff
significant bits in color specification: 8 bits
visual:
visual id: 0x22
class: DirectColor
depth: 24 planes
available colormap entries: 256 per subfield
red, green, blue masks: 0xff0000, 0xff00, 0xff
significant bits in color specification: 8 bits

I upgraded to xorg 6.9 but no joy. Not sure how to determine if it's a VESA server or not. Thanks.

Well, where 6.9 is concerned I experienced very poor performance even with an optimized installation so take that for what it's worth.

Now as far as your specific installation: I don't see anything chipset-specific so could you please post the "Device" section from your xorg.conf file? What video chipset does your system have?

Nothing much has changed since I updated to 6.9. In fact, my keyboard and mouse support has suffered as a result. Anyway, in response to your questions, I have an intel i810 onboard graphics card. Here is the device section of xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Standard VGA"
VendorName "Unknown"
BoardName "Unknown"

# The chipset line is optional in most cases. It can be used to override
# the driver's chipset detection, and should not normally be specified.

# Chipset "generic"

# The Driver line must be present. When using run-time loadable driver
# modules, this line instructs the server to load the specified driver
# module. Even when not using loadable driver modules, this line
# indicates which driver should interpret the information in this section.

Driver "vga"
# The BusID line is used to specify which of possibly multiple devices
# this section is intended for. When this line isn't present, a device
# section can only match up with the primary video device. For PCI
# devices a line like the following could be used. This line should not
# normally be included unless there is more than one video device
# intalled.

# BusID "PCI:0:10:0"

# VideoRam 256

# Clocks 25.2 28.3

EndSection

There you go; you have the VESA driver installed. What you need to do is one for intel chipsets - you may have to download the source and compile it, but back up /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then try running sax2 again.

I've changed xorg.conf to use the i810 driver but video playback is still jerky. Should I enable DRI? I've heard this can be quite buggy.

I'm going to upgrade to opensuse 10.1 this week in an effort to fix the problem. This has been working in 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 so perhaps it will work.