Re: [xine-devel] Playback smoothness of DVD's vs. mplayer

[Miguel F. <mfr...@gm...>]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 14:43:01 -0800, Chris White <cb...@cs...> wrote:
> I've built a mythTv box for my home theater and have been playing around
> with getting satisfactory dvd playback. I've searched around the
> archives and google and tried most things I've found, but xine still has
> a little jerkiness when playing back dvds or mpegs (this is without any
> chain-reaction filtering, etc.). I had the same issue with mplayer,
> until I set /proc/dev/rtc/max-user-freq to 1024 or whatever. Now mplayer
> is flawlessly smooth, but xine is still the same. I *love* xine's
> interface and the deinterlacing options are far superior to mplayer's,
> but I just can't seem to get it smooth. I guess my first question is why
> might this be? Is the metronom implemented in such a way as to not be at
> a high enough resolution? Is there a compile time option I need, or is
> there a way to get the metronom to use a better clock source?


xine does not use the RTC interrupts to provide the timing base, but
rather use the OS's sleep function (which depends on scheduler
interrupts). 2.4 kernels have a 100Hz scheduler timer by default,
therefore, 10ms resolution.

you can either change scheduler timer to 1000Hz (a trivial change, see
xine FAQ and ask us if you need help) or try a 2.6 kernel. also
running xine like "nice --10 xine" might help.

personally, i prefer 2.4 + lowlat patches (this is what i use for
embedded system at work) but your mileage may vary. recently i've
tried setting up a epia-m 10k at home with 2.6 but i couldn't get it
to work very well (sound skipping), and i tried really hard, several
kernel versions and a couple of patches, different schedulers....
2.6.10+ had the best results, but still not as good as 2.4 imho.

Miguel