Just how does one turn on DMA? --doug At 18:51 06/11/2002 +0000, michael norman wrote:

I've been using xine for a while on the last few SuSE releleases. Oddly enough I never had to enable dma before for dvds to play really well until 8.0. This is on a p11 866 with 256mb ram. But I had to turn on dma in 8.0 to solve jerky playback I'd never had before. Wonder why ?

Mike

On Tuesday 11 June 2002 13:08, Bill Sheehan wrote:

...

Hi Kevin,

My favorite viewer is Xine. MPlayer is good, but I can't handle the scornful and patronizing attitude that seems to pervade the documentation, and it's a real bear to set up. I've got the Pioneer DVD player, a gig of RAM, an AMD 1800+ and an nVidia GT4600 - in short, pretty state of the art. DVDs still stuttered along. What fixed everything was turning on DMA on the DVD player and creating a raw device for it.

Instructions on how to do both are in Xine's FAQ.

Bill Sheehan Postmaster 617-373-7927

Kevin McLauchlan cc: Subject: Re: [SLE] Watching DVD's in 8.0 06/10/02 02:56 PM

On Saturday 08 June 2002 04:13, Graham Murray wrote:

...

Forrest Halford writes:

...

Just to start a friendly new thread, is anyone watching DVD's in Suse 8.0? How does one do it...?

Yes. I use Xine. You can download it from URL:http://xine.sourceforge.net. You might also want to use the Dvdnav plugin which is referenced from the same page.

What ELSE are you using? Same question to Ms. McKinney, with respect to vlc.

I've encountered two schools of thought on this.

1) you can run just the software (like vlc or xine), and that's all you need on a decent PC with a decent video card (i.e., if your hardware is no more than a couple of years old), for smooth video and sound from a DVD.

versus

2) you need a DVD decoder card to get smooth video and sound out of a DVD drive and onto your screen and speakers.

I have an Athlon 1.1 with half a gig of system memory, and a 32MB ATI video card and a Pioneer DVD drive. I've also got a Hollywood-clone decoder card (well, actually it's not a clone, it's just re-branded). In 18 months, I've never watched a DVD movie. There's always something wrong. Jittery, stop-motion video, or missing/garbled sound, or the program hangs, or won't start... or... or... I've had the decoder card in, and I've had it out. I've dozens of settings/tweaks that I saw suggested on the vlc mailing list (always trying to interpret for SuSE from the contributors' RH/Mandrake/Debian/whatever suggestions), until my blood pressure got too high, and I had to quit trying for a while. Can't get no satisfaction. It's been a few months; must be time to try again.

I wanna watch "Chicken Run" all the way through, dammit! :-)

/kevin

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On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 03:13:43PM -0400, Bill Sheehan wrote:

Hi Doug,

Simple - I just put it in my /etc/init.d/boot.local

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdd

I wanted to offer up my experience today since I just installed a DVD into my laptop. I have a Dell Inspiron 8000, 1Ghz, 256MB RAM, Nvidia Geforce2go 32MB, running SuSE 8.0. I've used Xine 0.9.7 in the past on another laptop and had good performance so my first try today was with the latest version of Xine, 0.9.10. Although I had no problems installing everything, I could not get DVDs to play correctly, getting something about an error reading the MRL. I was going to try 0.9.7 again but instead decided to give Ogle a try. I downloaded the Red Hat RPMs from the Ogle site and they installed in reasonable places without complaint. One nice thing about ogle is that it has fewer packages than Xine. Here are the packages I downloaded: libdvdcss2-1.2.1-1plf.i586.rpm libdvdread-0.9.3-ogle1.src.rpm libxml2-2.4.12-1.i386.rpm ogle-0.8.2-1.i386.rpm ogle-gui-0.8.2-1.i386.rpm I did not install the libxml2 rpm since it was already installed on my system. I fired up ogle and it was able to play one of my DVD movies although the performance was only about 19-21 frames per second, a little erratic. Then, I turned dma (the -X34 for mode2 may or may not help): hdparm -d1 -X34 /dev/hdc After DMA was on, I got the full 24 frames per second and it works great. So, for now, I can highly recommend the latest ogle. It's a little easier to set up than Xine due to fewer packages. Best Regards, Keith -- LPIC-2, MCSE, N+ Linux soldat -- 8.0 SuSE panzer division Got spam? Get spastic http://spastic.sourceforge.net