Totem and Xvid encoded AVIs...
 

Greetings, all!

I'm having a bit of trouble with Totem on my Fedora 3 boxes. Nothing really major, but something I'd definitely like fixed, if possible. I downloaded the totem-xine packages from a freshrpms apt repository. Plays media perfectly; can pop in a DVD and playback is smooth as silk with little to no frame loss.

Before anyone suggests xine or mplayer, I've tried both in the past, and Totem definitely takes the cake over both for my needs.

Being a nerd :cool: I like to download and watch fansubbed anime, which is usually encoded in Xvid. Problem is Totem playback of Xvid is less than stellar, and often stutters at certain points in the video. From experience, it seems that it is only having problems with Xvid, and not videos encoded in Divx 5. I had a couple episodes of The Broken which are encoded in Divx 5, which play back with no problems, but I had a couple of episodes of Systm which have serious playback stuttering. My episodes of Bleach and Speedgrapher have some minor stuttering, which isn't too huge of a problem, but one that's annoying enough while trying to watch the videos.

Here's my system specs...

550 MHz AMD Athlon
224 MB RAM
S3 Savage 4

Like I said, it plays DVDs flawlessly, but it has minor stuttering while playing Xvid encoded AVIs; DivX encoded files play without a hitch. I have gkrellm running all the time, and while playing the videos, the CPU usage never goes higher than 60 - 70%. I had thought of trying to run the totem process with higher priority, but I'm not clear on how to do that. Regardless, this is the main system I'd like to get playing these videos perfectly smooth. I just recently dumped Windows XP in exchange for further progressing into having a primarily Linux based set of PCs (2 of my 3 PCs run Linux). So far, I'm really tempted to take this PC back to Windows XP, since it played back Xvid encoded AVIs flawlessly.

As for my other box...

350 MHz Pentium II
224 MB RAM
ATI Rage Mach64

I don't expect to be able to play Xvid encoded files at all. There's some severe stuttering when I try to play these videos, but like the other system DVDs and DivX encoded AVIs have little to no stuttering during playback. If it could play the videos too, that'd be great. If not, no big deal.

Now on a side note, regarding the 550 MHz Athlon box, the only things making me want to go back to Windows XP are:

1. Scanner isn't compatible with SANE, which isn't that big of a deal. Something I can live without.

2. The problem mentioned in this thread. Definitely something that I need to have work right.

3. Prolly the most important of all, I need a program like NeroVision Express for Windows XP to encode VCDs from all my encoded AVIs. This is definitely something very important to me.

Hello,

Some thoughts on your questions -

1. No scanner... What make / model is it?

2. Xvid problem - not sure here. I don't think running with higher priority will necessarily help. Are you playing files from optical disk storage, or from your hard disk? Have you got DMA enabled for all your drives? Perhaps you could post a link to a download of one of your 'problem' files and I'll see if I can reproduce..

3. For encoding AVIs to VCD, try Avidemux - it's a really excellent little program, but get hold of the latest copy you can. Works like a charm for me.

The Scanner is a Hewlett Packard ScanJet 3570c, and I've looked at SANE's compatability list on their site, and it's not listed. Read another site that had a guy that said he was working on a driver for it, but it had gone since mid-2003 without an update. Doesn't look like he got around to finishing the driver.

As far as videos, if you have bittorrent, http://a.scarywater.net/lunar/ and download any episode of Bleach, or go to http://www.systm.org/ and download any episode there.

I'll check out avidemux. It looks to be even more fully-featured than NeroVision Express. :D