[MPlayer-users] Problem with playing mpeg2 files smoothly

[Arwed von Merkatz]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 09:29:58PM +0200, Martin Grim  wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hi,
> 
> > I am facing problems with playing mpeg2 files. About every second the video
> > stops for a very short amount of time. Funny thing is that when replaying the
> > same mpeg2 file, the problem doesn't reoccur for the part of the file which has
> > been played before.
> 
> The problem remains: I've tried basically every option and option combination 
> of -cache -nocache -ao -vo -vfm etc. Grrrr.
> 
> In the end I managed to play my 5 minute MPEG2 video (300 Mbyte) smoothly, but 
> for this to happen I had to dump the entire video first to /dev/null with
> 
>     cat $(HOME)/movies/5-minute-test.mpg > /dev/null
> 
> Playing the movie after this resulted in a smooth display! 
> 
> What does this tell me? I bought delibaratly the fastest hard drive (in rpm) I 
> could find (playing from CDROM didn't improve things at all). Is something 
> wrong with data transport from disk to memory to video card? Did I miss a 
> setting? Any idea where/what I should check now?
> 
> Any tip would make me happy: now I am totally in the dark (and I don't know 
> where to look for the switch).
 
Maybe the harddisk isn't switched to dma mode, check this with
hdparm -d <device>
if it isn't in dma mode, use hdparm -d1 <device> to activate it. You may
also look at the other hdparm settings, especially -m and -X to improve
hd performance.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz
Grimoire Guru for video
Grimoire Guru for xfce
Sourcemage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org