Laptop Specs:
PII 366Mhz
128 megs ram
14.1 Gig HD
DVD Drive

Fresh install of Slack and Xine.

Installed xine ok, and it does play on my IBM Thinkpad 770Z (old) but it's
really poor in playing DVD's i.e. video is jumpy and gets outta sync a bit.

At first the sound was bad static and nasty but then I changed drivers to
use esd and xshm. The sound has since been fine but the playback is still lousey. I have a Trident 93** chipset but I'm not even sure it's using it. I heard using the xv driver is better but I had to swtch just to get this far.

The terminal output at xine runtime concering Xv is :

"Xv extension is present but I couldn't find a usuable yuv12 port.
Looks like your graphics hardware driver doesn't support Xv?! "

xvinfo command gives:
"screen #0
no adapters present"

Arg! where do I start? Been beating google to death looking but no luck so far.

I think your starting point should be the faq. probably in /usr/doc/xine/faq/faq.html
look for the 'running xine' section
you can run xine-check from the command line, this will show up serious errors.

You can check which capabilities your video driver has with command :
"grep -i extension /var/log/XFree86.0.log".

But by looking at the page "http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/trident.4.html" the following can be found :

'...The XvImage extension is supported on TGUI96xx and greater cards."

So, unfortunately, as far as XFree86 tweaking goes, this is (I think) it. You're graphics card has some limitations in the current driver for the Trident chipset.

The only tip I can give to you is to try to optimize things as much as possible. It might be interesting to recompile Xine with some flags passed to gcc for your Pentium II processor, or some other optimization flags.

You can also try MPlayer, it's quite a fast media player with a lot of capabilities.

ps. I also checked SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux for you (an alternative for the XFree86 system), but alas, your chipset is not listed in their Certified Chip List.

If you're still interested in this tool, This is the URL :
"http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/enterprise/snap_linux.html"

Good luck in your quest for more speed!

I got the Xv extension working. The video is as smooth as silk but unfortuately enough there is one more issue for me to iron out. found out about MPlayer being better than Xine too late and I'm not too quick to start downloading several packages again on dial-up. Telling me to get Mplayer is the same as telling urself to get xine. I'm not doing it if I can get this working.

For now, my audio lags behind the video and tweaking the gui sound settings aren't cutting it. Any ideas ?


For my sound card support I use the sb module.
I use "modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1" written into rc.M
script. Is this an issue ?


I think I'm at the home stretch with this, I am definitely pitching in for beer money if I get this wroking.