[ILUG] Playing DVDs with MPlayer

[Gavin McCullagh]

I'm having similar problems on a P2 400MHz/128MB RAM.  I'm on the way I
think to correcting them, with substantial help from the group, but have not 
had time yet to finish the job.  

The problem it's thought for me was twofold.  First up I was using the nv
driver instead of nvidias own one which is a good bit better.  Once I
changed this I went from being unwatchable to being quite watchable
(although not great) with the -framedrop switch.

The theories expressed to me by several people were poor sound card support.
This (if I've understood correctly) can be very wasteful of your PCI
bandwidth.  I personally am using an Aureal Vortex 1 sound card, the support
for which was somewhat hacked together after the company went bust without
giving any info about the card.  I have to find a soundblaster or similar
well supported card to see if it helps.  Anyway, I havn't done that yet.

It looks like you have the ATI Rage 128 drivers working.  Maybe sound card
is a problem.


On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, Roger Irwin wrote:

> I have set up MPlayer and got it to play DVDs using sdl:dga amount other
> video modes and the best I can get is for it to drop ~12.5% of frames which
> isn't as good a preformance as I would have expected on my system (AMD
> 1400 with DDR). CPU usage isn't high with MPlayer showing up on gtop at
> ~14% while playing in X11 mode or:
> Broken pipe 364.3 A-V: -0.036 ct: -0.071  9101/9101  15%  4% 35.5% 1225 0
> 
> This leads me to supect my ATI xpert 2000 can't be set up properly or is
> in framebuffer mode or something... Surly that isn't the case?