[xine-user] Re: anyone playing movies watchably?

[Chris M. <maj...@cs...>]

Success! As I was going home, soberly contemplating reinstalling
X, upgrading to kernel 2.4, buying a new video card, buying a new CPU,
etc. etc., I stopped  by a computer shop to look around.  On a whim, I
bought  a   SoundBlaster  PCI128   sound  card.  Mainly   because  I'd
experienced some latency problems  while doing sound recording with my
old  ISA card,  and someone  on the  ecasound list  had  suggested the
PCI128. Also because I suspected  these latency problems could come up
again with DVDs.  After popping in the PCI sound  card, I watched Full
Metal Jacket  again. It froze  once, but was otherwise  perfect. (Well,
almost --  I'm still not totally  convinced about the  sound and video
sync,   but  maybe   that's  just   a  feature   of   that  particular
DVD.  Sometimes  in the  movie  theatre  you  don't get  perfect  sync
either.) I then watched Analyze  This, which I don't recommend, but it
played beautifully  (not a single  glitch if I recall  correctly). The
next day I performed the ultimate  test, and invited a friend over. We
watched  Kubrick's Barry  Lyndon. The  picture froze  once,  which was
funny, because the  sound kept going and we weren't  sure if the black
screen was part  of the movie or not. Anyway,  I can successfully play
movies with this setup:

PIII 500 (Katmai)
ATI Xpert98 8MB ("Rage Pro", uses XF86_Mach64)
Pioneer DVD-116 DVD-ROM
Sound Blaster PCI128 (Ensoniq ens1371, using ALSA drivers)
Linux 2.2.17
XFree86 3.3.6 (no XVideo extension, using shared memory)
(using 16-bit color)

Yes, it uses a lot of CPU,  but looks great in 640x480. Now all I need
is a bigger monitor..

A big thanks to the xine hackers.
Just tell me where to send the money ;)

-chris

On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Chris Majewski wrote:

> I watched  my first DVD last night  -- Full Metal Jacket,  which was a
> mistake because it's a 3 hour movie and so it took me about 5 hours to
> watch   the  whole  thing,   what  with   skipping  and   hanging  and
> restarting. It didn't  help that I started at 1 AM.  Which leads me to
> ask: has  anyone here been able  to play DVDs, under  Linux, without a
> hardware decoder,  successfully? When I say successfully,  I mean well
> enough to invite some friends over, let the thing roll, and never have
> to touch it? If  so, what kind of hardware are you  running on? I have
> the following  set-up, and if  I get any  reports of success,  I'll be
> wondering what to upgrade first:
> 
> PIII 500 (Katmai)
> ATI Xpert98 8MB ("Rage Pro", uses XF86_Mach64)
> Pioneer DVD-116 DVD-ROM
> Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA (using isapnp)
> 
> I'm  running xine-0.4.01  under XFree86  3.3.6 and  kernel  2.2.17.  I
> played the "echo blah > /proc/mtrr" game, but no idea if successfully
> or not.  No Xv, I know, but  presumably this is only  a cosmetic issue
> and not  a performance issue?   Or should I expect  significantly less
> skipping with Xv?
> 
> -chris
> 
>