Xine gets choppy half way thru DVD

[scoldog]

Hello all,

I've got an IBM Thinkpad T22 that's running Fedora Core 5 fine, except for some problems with Xine.

The main problem is, DVD playback starts getting choppy about half way through a DVD even when Xine isn't in full-screen mode.

Just quiting Xine and restarting it doesn't fix it, it normally means a restart.

I'm guessing the video settings need a tweak, but I don't know the first thing about Xine settings. Can anyone give me some ideas of what to look at?

[scoldog]

9 times out of 10 after the video goes choppy, the audio is fine.

[bigtomrodney]

What's the temperature like on the laptop? It sounds like the CPU might be suffering a bit. From a terminal, run

acpi -t

to see what temp you are running at and post back.

[deltatux]

try this:
Go to Konsole
type su -c "hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc" (WITH THE QUOTATION MARKS!)
enter ROOT PASSWORD

It should then spit something out like this:

/dev/hdc:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)

deltatux

[scoldog]

Hi all,

I could only get an acpi result.

It was running at about 67 degrees. Doesn't sound too good, does it?

However, I did notice that while I watched the DVD with the laptop plugged in. it didn't skip at all throughout the whole movie (I was watching Gladiator, the longest movie I've got).

I'll give it a bit more testing over the week, and get back to.

[bigtomrodney]

Well there's thwo things there - A laptop running at 67 degrees is quite hot, so it may get sluggish. At that point because of poor air flow it will continue to get hotter without being able to cool down quick enough. At critical temperature it may hang X, and possibly even shutdwon.

On the other side you mentioned you were watching the film when running on battery. I would guess your CPU is throttling down to half speed, which is normal for laptops from the last few years. If you are using KDE you can use kpowersave to force your laptop into full power mode (performance mode rather than dynamic or powersave) but this will have the effect of both shortening your battery life and possibly contributing to your heat problem.

[scoldog]

I'm using Gnome. Dunno which GUI is better for a P3 900Mhz really, but I can't be stuffed starting another flame war over it.

Anyhoo, thanks for your help bigtomrodney and everyone else.