On Tuesday 29 October 2002 12.29, John Pettigrew wrote:
I've been trying to play DVDs on my SuSE 8.1 box with only partial success. Using either MPlayer or Xine, I can play DVDs but the playback is very jerky. Playing DVDs on the same box (Athlon 1.2 GHz, GeForce2 MX/400) under Windows is smooth, so there is definitely some improvement possible.
One possibility that occurred to me is DMA settings for the DVD drive. However, under SuSE 8.1, it's running as SCSI emulation. How do I check whether DMA is enabled - there's no listing under the DMA tool for the emulated drives.
Do you know what device it was before it was an ide-scsi emulated monstrosity? Look at the boot parameters if you don't, it should say something like hdX=ide-scsi, where X is a, b, c or d. Let's say it's hdc Run /sbin/hdparm /dev/hdc to check the current settings. If dma is off, su to root and run /sbin/hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdc. even though the drive is using ide-scsi, hdparm will still work on the old ide device name. To make this happen on bootup, put "hdc" in the variable DEVICES_FORCE_DMA_ON in /etc/sysconfig/hardware. Remove it from OFF in that file if it happens to be listed. Anders