Recent poor DVD playback performance

[Philip Walden]

Philip Walden wrote:

> I have FC5 and recently my DVD playback has tanked.
>
> Both xine and mplayer (from livna and greysector repos respectively) 
> act like they cannot read the dvd fast enough. Xine plays for about 10 
> seconds and then freezes for a a second or two, plays some more and 
> then freezes again. Meanwhile the disk led is dark with minimal 
> activity. The same thing happens with a mounted DVD in the DVD-ROM 
> drive. So it is not my disk. Mplayer complains that "Your system is 
> too SLOW to play this!"
>
> It is a 800Mhz athlon with 256MB memory and a nvidia tnt2 AGP using 
> the nv driver. Although it is older machine, this system was great at 
> playing DVDs up until a couple of weeks ago. So I suspect a yum update 
> might have done something. Before this, I have been playing DVDs on it 
> happily for a couple of years from RH9, to FC4 and now FC5.
>
> Anyone have some ideas for me to try oir areas to explore?
>
> Philip

and I did check with hdparm that DMA was on for all my IDE drives.