DVD playback slow & choppy

[Kevin Kempter]

On Sunday 19 November 2006 4:35 pm, Peter Gordon wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 16:20 -0700, Kevin Kempter wrote:
> > Hi List;
> >
> > I just inatalled FC6 on a Pentium 2.2Gz thinkpad with 2G of memory. I
> > installed mplayer, the mplayer codecs, xine, kaffeine, etc.  Both Xine
> > and Kaffeine play DVD's but the playback is slow & choppy.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any help/advice...
>
> Hmm. First thing that comes to mind is the video scaling. Does it play
> OK in a window and not full-screened? If so, it's likely that you're
> using software scaling (raw X11 output) versus XVideo, which sends the
> images to the video hardware and lets the GPU do the scaling (resulting
> in vastly smoother playback).
>
> For mplayer, this is the "-vo xv" option (or you can set vo=xv in your
> mplayer.conf file to make it permanent). For Totem, this can be set
> through the Video tab in the GNOME Multimedia Preferences
> (System --> Preferences --> More Preferences --> Multimedia Systems
> Selector from the main GNOME menus).
>
> Also, is DMA enabled for your DVD drive? If not, this also causes a lot
> of CPU usage too. Check that it is set (and set it if not) by running
> `/sbin/hdparm -d 1 /dev/dvd`  as root (setting the device node as
> appropriate).

I tried this:# /sbin/hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
 using_dma    =  0 (off)

I tried the same for /dev/dvd (which is a sumlink to /dev/hdc) with the same 
result. 

Also mplayer doesnt play any DVD's but Xine & Kaffeine do (although with the 
slow,choppy issue)