Hi there,

Right so i have just managed to install R5E50 after about 3 weeks of crying and kicking my box. I have also installed a package which shall not be named which allows me to watch my commercially bought DVD's. Now if i watch said DVD's in xine its so unwatchable its crazy (jerky video). However if i choose to use mplayer then the quality is great. Unfortunately the dvd doesnt start playing from the beginning - for example if i try to play my Shaun of the Dead DVD it plays one of the extra features and then drops back out into mythtv. How might i go about ensuring my dvds start from the beginning if i chose to use mplayer as my default dvd player?

Thanks

Rob

Have you updated your libxine with apt-get as per this thread? http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14181&highlight=libxine

The xine player "just works" for me, but I may have fiddled with the setup menus back at the dawn of time and they've carried across my upgrades ever since...

What command are you using to invoke it? I've had good luck with:

I will try updating as per your suggestion but i dont have a problem with sound being out of sync, just the fact that the vdieo is jerkier than a bag of that nasty beef flavoured snack.

Cant figure out what that might be if mplayer quite happily plays it fairly smoothly?

Oh and no joy using

--auto-scan, its still as jerky as ever.

Cheers for the suggestion though

Well I'm sure you've got these elsewhere but more details about the system and configuration here would be helpful. What kind of video output? What resolution? Are you using XvMC? How about deinterlacing and filtering? Does the DVD drive have DMA enabled?

If you ssh in and run top where does it show the CPU time going? What are your load averages? How is you memory/swap usage? ...

This almost always comes down to conflicting load on the system, or some latency/buffering problem.

At work at the moment so cant give you full details but DMA is enabled on the drive (UDMA2 i believe). Video output is onboard VIA (had to change it to vesa in the xorg.conf file to make the system work properly). Resolution is 1024x768. Not really sure about XvMC (mainly because i dont know what it is - ill check that one out later). Also not sure about de-interlacing & filtering (im guessing this is a setting i can change in xine).

When i get home tonight ill try to update libxine and then ill investigate XvMC along with checking the deinterlacing and filtering options in xine. Thanks for the help i do appreciate it.

Ah... Well the vesa driver is probably a big part of the story. The accelerated drivers provide something called "Xv" support (video playback support under X) for output of "video" (in the TV and movies sense). I'm pretty sure the vesa driver doesn't, which means the CPU is working MUCH harder to get the picture on the screen. Beyond Xv is XvMC (motion compensation) which again uses hardware accleration to support decoding an MPEG stream and reduce the load on the CPU. You absolutely needed an accelerated driver for this. I know that the nVidia and Via Unichrome drivers have support for this, not as sure about the ATi driver.

See this page over on the MythTV wiki for more details - http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC