I have DVD playback working with xine, but it is not quite as smooth as it should be. It's not dropping frames, but when there is a lot of movement in a scene it is noticeably choppy.

The machine is a 1.5GHz AMD Duron with 512Meg RAM.

hdparm returns the following for the DVD drive:

/dev/dvd:
HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Function not implemented
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

If I understand correctly, this means DMA is enabled.

I am using a PVR-350 and I am routing the video through the card's TV out. Watching live television is flawless.

Some have suggested setting "nice" values for X and xine to negative values to ensure they receive the highest priority. However, I have not found a posting showing exactly how to do this.

Would somebody please give me some directions for doing this?

Thanks,
Errol
errol@bitterkitten.com

You could try and set the DVD speed to 4x hdparm -E4 /dev/dvd I have seen that before. man hdparm for more options.

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Post the display driver section from your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. I think you do not have the correct options enabled.

weblst:

I have not tried that. I will try that when I get home this evening.

ryanpatterson:

Here are the contents of the file you requested. I wasn't sure which sections were relevant so I just posted the whole thing. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have!

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "XFree86 Configured"
Screen 0 "TV Screen" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
# PS/2 Mouse using /dev/input/mice in Kernel 2.6
# Serial Mouse not detected
InputDevice "USB Mouse" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "true"

EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4: unmodified: line 1
# Additional fonts: Locale, Gimp, TTF...
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/75dpi"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/100dpi"
# True type and type1 fonts are also handled via xftlib, see /etc/X11/XftConfig!
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/ttf/western"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/ttf/decoratives"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/truetype"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/latex-ttf-fonts"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/defoma/CID"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/defoma/TrueType"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "ddc" # ddc probing of monitor
# Load "GLcore"
Load "dbe"
# Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "glx"
Load "bitmap" # bitmap-fonts
Load "speedo"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "record"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"

EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Serial Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Microsoft"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "70"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "PS/2 Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "70"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "USB Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"
EndSection

# Auto-generated by KNOPPIX mkxf86config




Section "Monitor"
Identifier "NTSC Monitor"
HorizSync 30-68
VertRefresh 50-120
Mode "720x480"
# D: 34.563 MHz, H: 37.244 kHz, V: 73.897 Hz
DotClock 34.564
HTimings 720 752 840 928
VTimings 480 484 488 504
Flags "-HSync" "-VSync"
EndMode
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Hauppauge PVR 350 iTVC15 Framebuffer"
Driver "ivtvdev"

### change fb0 to whatever number you got in the previous section
Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
Option "ivtv" "/dev/fb0"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "XVideo" "1"
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "XFree86 Configured"
Screen 0 "TV Screen" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
# PS/2 Mouse using /dev/input/mice in Kernel 2.6
# Serial Mouse not detected
InputDevice "USB Mouse" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AllowMouseOpenFail" "true"

EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"

The critical section is:


But it hould actually look something like:
I can't beleave the xserver starts with the setting you posted. Did you just copy it wrong?

ryanpatterson:

You are right -- I must have screwed up copying and pasting. Here is the relevant section again:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Hauppauge PVR 350 iTVC15 Framebuffer"
Driver "ivtvdev"

### change fb0 to whatever number you got in the previous section
Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
Option "ivtv" "/dev/fb0"
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
Option "XVideo" "1"

### change the busid to whatever is reported by lspci. Note that
### output of lspci is hex, so add a preceding "0x" to the BusID
BusID "PCI:0:9:0"

Screen 0
EndSection

Well the device section for the pvr-350 looks fine.

Could you ssh into your box from another computer and run the program 'top' while you are playing a DVD? That will show you all the processes that are running. If the cpu is being maxed out then that is probably your problem.

weblst:

I tried hdparm -E4 /dev/dvd but that did not appear to work:

/dev/dvd:
setting cdrom speed to 4
CDROM_SELECT_SPEED failed: Input/output error

ryanpatterson:

I ran top while a DVD was playing and saw results like this hold steady:

Tasks: 83 total, 1 running, 82 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 28.2% us, 6.6% sy, 0.0% ni, 65.1% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 1032908k total, 1015848k used, 17060k free, 299844k buffers
Swap: 1953496k total, 0k used, 1953496k free, 459552k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5675 mythtv 0 0 262m 45m 14m S 21.6 4.5 1:29.08 xine
4625 root 0 0 55960 51m 10m S 12.6 5.1 6:50.45 X
6521 root 15 0 2204 1108 844 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.05 top
1 root 0 0 160 80 52 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.04 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
3 root 0 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
4 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0

This makes it seem like CPU / RAM are not an issue.

Here is some more info from the DVD drive:

hdparm -Tt /dev/dvd consistently shows results like this:

/dev/dvd:
Timing cached reads: 840 MB in 2.00 seconds = 420.00 MB/sec
BLKFLSBUF failed: Function not implemented
Timing buffered disk reads: 18 MB in 3.34 seconds = 5.38 MB/sec
BLKFLSBUF failed: Function not implemented

Is that sufficient?

Is it possible that my problem is not related to the DVD drive?

The best way I can describe the image quality is to say that when there is fast movement in a scene you can see trails (kind of trippy, but not in a good way).

top shows that the cpu and memory are not the bottleneck.

I don't think the dvd drive speed is a problem. Unless you have an other drive on the same ata channel (same ribbon cable). Many drives (cd/dvd in particular) can have bad performance when sharing the ata channel. A simple test like 'hdparm -Tt /dev/dvd' wont show a problem though.

Have you tried using mplayer or 'internal' as the dvd player to see if they show the same problem?

I think it might just be a case of the framebuffer not being quick enough to display the fast action. Though I would expect the cpu to be maxed if that were the case.

Have you tried going into "TV Settings" then "Playback" and changing the "Preferred MPEG2 Decoder"? And also make sure you're not deinterlacing your playback if you're plugged into a TV... Both of these options are on the first page of the Playback settings.

Thanks for the suggestions!

ryanpatterson:

The DVD drive is on the same channel as the CD/RW drive. The CD/RW is primary and the DVD drive is secondary. Do you think that could be causing the problem?

I have not tried mplayer. Xine was configured by default. Can you tell me what steps to take to try mplayer?

pearlous:

I made sure deinterlace is disabled and tried every setting for "Preferred MPEG2 Decoder." I also tried disabling the setting for using the hardware mpeg decoder on the PVR-350. None of these settings seemed to have any effect.

The thing that makes this so confusing to me is the fact that live TV (and recorded TV) playback is flawless. It's just DVD playback that shows these weird artifacts.

If you want to rule out the DVD drive as the problem, you could rip the dvd in iso quality and then play the resulting file.

That should be fine unless you are using the CR/RW drive at the same time.


I don't know the command line for mplayer off the top of my head. Google can probably help.

Playing DVD's with xine (or mplayer) wont use those settings at all. They are external programs which are not actually a part of mythtv. So they are unaware of any setting changes you make to mythtv.

Sorry about that, I realized how the TV playback was not related to DVD playback after my last post. I'm having the same "jerky" DVD playback issue as well. I'm on R5E50 on an AMD Geode processor running @ 1.4GHz w/ 768MB of memory. My graphics card is an nvidia TNT2.

I had the same problem with R5E50, I found that DMA was not on by default.

I also had to install libdvdcss2, if you haven't done so.

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Thanks
Sam Taylor
Radio Rocks with LWRadio - No False Crap