[MPlayer-users] video slow - I think

[Anita Lewis]

I've been working on this for days.  I was trying to use an AMD K6-2 400
processor with ATI RageIIC video and SB audio.  I had trouble with Windows
using PowerDVD - had to keep reinstalling, but could watch movies.  Then I
tried to watch Lord of the Rings on it and couldn't get the PowerDVD to
work.  Meanwhile I was working with mplayer in Debian woody - kernel 2.4.7 -
same hardware.  The sound stopped after about 10 seconds.  I gave up on the
hardware, thinking the processor was too slow.

So I am now on a microtel with no real cards.  I get the same thing as on
the other machine and found the framedrop solution.  The video and audio
play in sync with that even though it is less than perfect.  When I do not
use framedrop, I see that the video is slower than the audio.  By this I
assume that my problem might be the video chip/memory situation.  I'm
wondering if it could help to put a SiS 6326 8MB card that I have laying
around into the machine.  I don't want to go to the bother of configuring X
and so on if it will not help.  

Here is what I have on the current video:

PCI devices found:

  Bus  1, device   0, function  0:
    VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1 (rev 106).
      IRQ 10.
      Master Capable.  Latency=32.  
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe5800000 [0xe5ffffff].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe6000000 [0xe601ffff].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe5000000 [0xe57fffff].

I don't know how to tell how much video memory there is here.  I think that
some of the RAM is being used for video since I have 128MB in the machine
and 'free' shows 117MB total.  That would make sense on a cheap machine,
which this one is.

So, can someone advise me here.  Is it possible that this movie is too much
for the system.  I recall differences on the other two movies I looked at in
Windows and then I was not able to view this one at all.  I don't have
another dvd to look at right now to test this.  Would it be worth trying the
other card?

Thanks.  Oh, yes, btw, I tried ogle and get video with lines through it and
only a strip in the center that is clear.  I got that when I ran '-vo xv'
with mplayer.  It does sync, but may be doing the same thing as -framedrop
to do it.

Anita