poor dvd playback on Pentium M 750

[Mike McMullen]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Edward Dekkers" <edward at tripled.iinet.net.au>
Subject: Re: poor dvd playback on Pentium M 750


> Jack Howarth wrote:
>>       Is there a particular reason why DVD playback is so choppy on
>> Pentium M laptops (a 1.86 GHz model 750 chip in this case)? I tried
>> xine, vlc and mplayer on Fedora Core 4 installed on a Dell Latitude
>> D810 and in all cases the playback stutters. This machine has the
>> ATI X600 graphics with the newest v8.16.20 driver livna packaged
>> driver installed. I am quite surprised by this since even a 450 Mhz
>> G4 with ppclinux could handle DVD playback smoothly leveraging
>> the Altivec support. I assumed that the mmx support on the Pentium M
>> would have provided as least as much performance but that doesn't 
>> appear to be the case.
>>              Jack
>> 
> 
> Check your hard disk/dvd rom parameters settings.
> 
> DVD playback can be notoriously slow when DMA is not enabled.
> 
> Regards,
> Ed.

And to add to that, check your /boot/grub/grub.conf file and look that
"ide=nodma" isn't on the kernel line that you are booting from. Many people
including me have to boot at installation with the "ide=nodma" parameter set
to keep from getting media failures.

If you don't select advanced grub options during the installation and take that
out, after installation you won't be using dma. 

If you have to remove that, reboot your system and you should notice a world
of difference in performance.

HTH,

Mike