[MPlayer-users] Choppy DVD playback

[Alexander Roalter]

Val wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-06-23 at 15:23 +0200, Alexander Roalter wrote:
>> The dvdnav-Patch is able to play this sort of discs, at least at my 
>> batch of problem discs. It seems to use some altogether different read 
>> mechanism to steer around the sectors. So ATM I can finally play all my 
>> DVDs again (subtitle problem(s) solved, Copy Protection playback solved)
> 
> Thanks for this piece of info, Alexander. I didn't know about dvdnav
> before. Unfortunately, recompiling mplayer with dvdnav support and
> playing this disk with "mplayer dvdnav://1" made no visible difference.
> The playback is still choppy. By choppy I mean that the image freezes
> for about a second and then catches up. This happens every 5-10 seconds.
> 
> Any other ideas on what I can try to diagnose this problem?
> 
> Thanks.
> 

If this happens, it might be the DVD drive is not up to the task on 
delivering the data fast enough. Either the drive lacks DMA-support 
(nowadays quite unlikely though) or the drive is slowly reaching it's 
end of life span (I already had to sort out 3 DVD drives in the last 4 
years, the first one clearly had problems reading some DVDs, especially 
those with a slightly golden surface (as the Godfather DVDs from 
Paramount had, better with the silver surface often encountered with 
DVDs from Warner, though. I didn't have *that* much DVDs back then (now 
I'm at about 400).

If there's some error reading the disc and the drive has to re-read, you 
can catch a glimpse at it with the `dmesg`-Command, which outputs read 
errors occured on the DVD drive. (though it's saturday, in canada 
there's still the entire day to get a new DVD drive... :)

hth,
Alex