[ILUG] P2 400MHz too slow for video?

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Fri, 02 Nov 2001, Ronan Cunniffe wrote:

> I'll stick my neck out here and say "driver issues" and "bus hogging".
> Sound cards and network adapters are notorious for hogging the bus above
> and beyond the call of duty.  Seriously well researched drivers (i.e. oem
> stuff) can avoid these problems, but hacker-written drivers, while they
> *work*, may not be doing minimal impact on the system.  Some
> motherboard chipsets respond spectacularly badly to some video
> adapters for inadequately explained reasons.

I have upgraded from STB nvidia ZXV 8MB to STB nvidia Velocity 4400 16MB.  This
doesn't seem to have made any difference, but it's still the same driver
and I guess a similar card.

> The only practical things I can suggest are
> 1) Try a different software set up - something lighter in weight than
> enlightenment/gnome.  Get other people's suggestions on what s/w
> combinations they use.

that might be worth it I guess, yeah.  Anyone any suggestions?

> 2) Try pulling your soundcard and see if that makes a difference - don't
> change the software you're using, just disable the soundcard.

I've run mplayer with the -nosound switch and where it normal complains
that "your system is not powerful enough to play this" it appears not to
when sound is disabled in this way.  however the picture still looks slow.

I tried xine and it segfaults unless I use the sdl driver.

Mplayer whwen I try using the xv driver says:

$ mplayer -framedrop -vo xv -stereo 1 -dvd 1
<snip>

Sorry, Xv not supported by this X11 version/driver
******** Try with  -vo x11  or  -vo sdl  *********
FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver!


> 3) And your NIC if you have one.

It is disabled.

> 2) Find out what chipset your mobo has, and search for any reports that it
> sucks under high-bandwidth/low-latency applications, or sucks when used
> with hardware made by manufacturer XXX.

I'll do that thanks, I really hope this is not the problem.

> No detailed help, I'm afraid, except to point out what you've already
> suggested - if everything was working the way you want it to, processor
> power (and memory size) should be irrelevant while the decoder, video and
> sound card get on with it.

this was my impression alright.

> P.S. Have you got a cheapo soundcard?  Does the soundcard have lots of
> knobs and switches implemented in the driver (and that can be switched
> off)?

It's an Aureal Vortex 1, uses au8820.o module.  I'm starting to guess that
this (an perhaps the video card) is the problem.  It is very much a hacked
together driver from what I can gather as aureal went out of business
without ever giving any help to the open source community.  I'm looking at
picking up something like a Creative Labs SB Live as I've heard lots of
good things about them in linux.

Thanks to all for the help,

Gavin