David Johanson wrote:
Thanks for the suggestion. I jumped into YaST and looked at DMA and noted that the dvd drive had DMA turned off so I elected to go with "UltraDMA/33". Well, that solved the jerky problem, but now I was without sound. It would run VERY smooth for a few minutes, 3-4, soundless, then crash with the error message "too many audio packets in the buffer" which seems odd since there was no sound provided. And yes, the sound does work, it was fine when things were jerky, but now there is no sound with the video. After several attempt at trying to see what setting might not be set correctly, mplayer stopped working giving the error message "error opening the selected video_out (-vo) device. Returning the dvd drive setting to "no DMA" didn't help any. Now I'm totally stumped.
You definitely want DMA on, regardless. This will help all your applications and not just mplayer. I can't help with the sound other than to suggest a) checking your sound configuration, and b) logging out and logging in again to see if this makes a difference. I do vaguely remember from when I used it that mplayer threw up this stuff about sound though I can't remember why. Unless someone else posts with the answer, my own suggestion is that you go to this link - http://packman.links2linux.org/index.php4?action=cat&cat=16 - and download the stuff for xine. You'll need xine-lib, xine-skins, xine-ui and kaffeine at the least. You will probably have to force-install them with rpm, but they should work (at least, they always have done here). There was a time when mplayer was superior to xine, but then they drew equal and then xine drew ahead by a large margin, imho. :) Fish