Fred A. Miller wrote:
Now that I'm taking some time off, I started to look further into tweaking this box. One common problem was that I didn't care for a PERCEIVED slowness in my nVidia 16X performance, and of course because of well known continual driver problems blamed nVidia that I had to reduce the color depth to 16 so that DVDs would play without any "jerkyness".
Today I was checking out a lot of hardware settings and found that the second DVD drive, a non-writer, wasn't set properly by openSUSE. The writer's DMA setting was ultra133, but it was off for the 2nd drive. I set it for ultra133 and then tested it ripping DVDs, etc., to see if it would do so accurately.....no losss. It did.....great!
Then I had the "wild" idea that just maybe with better transfer rates, I'd change the video setting back to 24 bit and see if the "jerky" display while playing a DVD returned. It didn't! So, if you have that problem, play around with the DMA settings on your DVD drive.
You must have missed all the discussions about the problem of jerkiness which have occurred over the past 18 months or so (since v10.0 if I remember correctly) and that setting the DMA of the DVD reader solves the problem. I would check the DMA settings in the Control Center/Hardware because I found that after you have set the DMA manually Yast2 does not retain that setting and the next time you boot the DMA is again not set. I found (the hard way :-( ) that the only way to ensure that the DMA is always correctly set is to put the entry in /etc/sysconfig/ide, DEVICES_FORCE_IDE_DMA="xxxxx" for *ALL* devices and not just for the CDROM or DVD which doesn't have its DMA set. In my case, DMA is not set by Yast2 for /dev/hdb (my CDROM/DVD) (although it is set for the other devices) but to get hdb set I have to insert the line, DEVICES_FORCE_IDE_DMA="/dev/hda:udma5 /dev/hdb:udma2 /dev/hdc:udma5 /dev/hdd:udma4" [1] otherwise hdb does not get set. YMMV. [1] hda=HD; hdb=CDROM/DVD reader; hdc=HD; hdd=DVD burner. Cheers. -- In a period of great joy and pleasure you are comforted by the thought that tragedy is just around the corner. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org