[PLUG] dvd playback sync

Jeff Schwaber freyley at gmx.net
Fri Nov 28 22:28:02 UTC 2003


Hi,

I've had a lot of trouble with playing dvds. The video and sound seem to
get out of sync fairly quickly (10-15 minutes into it) and deteriorate
over the course of watching. I've tried a whole bunch of things, and
it's gotten somewhat better, but still problematic.

Here's the system:

amd athlon t-bird 1100 mhz 
512 MB PC133 DIMM
Matrox G200 8MB AGP video
onboard AC97 sound
NEC DVD Drive, unknown speed

I had an older ATI video card in there for a while, and the upgrade to
the matrox g200 was very helpful. I also started using the 2.6.0-testX
series of kernels, and that helped a lot too, especially with ALSA.

I could upgrade the video card again, try to find a g400, but I'm kinda
skeptical that's the issue. I checked with hdparm and found that the dvd
drive was responding at 2 MB/s. Turning on dma and 32-bit io (-c1, -d1)
brought that up to 2.85 MB/s, but I can't help but think that this may
be one of the problems. Anyone know anything about getting a dvd drive
to go faster? (or do I just need a newer dvd drive?) The actual bus is
ATA/133/100/66/33 and I've gotten up to 22 MB/s off an IDE hard drive,
and there's nothing else on this channel, so it's not the bus.

Also, is that speed the bottleneck? I've been told that PC133 memory is
just too slow for that kind of playback, but I'm skeptical of that. I
was told the sound driver was the problem, but with the 2.6 kernels
comes ALSA, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem anymore.

Thoughts?

Jeff





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