Postby mlok » 23 Aug 2005 20:19
I've got exactly the same problem as above - it's been a hassle for a month now, all started suddenly. Today, I've spent the whole day on this, so I'm going to give you more details about what's happening.
I have winXP, Pentium4 2GHz laptop, with 512Mb RAM.
When I try to read a dvd, vlc will start chopping video & sound after a short while (can be 1min or sometimes up to 5min...) I've noticed it tends to be worse when I check the "menu support" option in the "open disc" panel. So I use the non-menu option that start playing the movie straight away.
If I shut vlc down and restart it, it will chop from the very beginning.
The only option is to restart the computer!
And then, after a few minutes, same thing.
So I started to play with the vlc cache option. And something interesting happened. This is what I did :
1. I shut my computer down.
2. I restart it, so that nothing is in memory. (CPU usage : 1%)
3. I run vlc, (CPU is still very low) open disc, I choose dvd without menu support, I choose streaming with cache=10000ms=10s. In stream settings I choose "play locally". (CPU is still very low)
4. I press "play" and during 10s nothing happens as vlc is caching datas in memory. CPU usage = 50% (+/- 10%)
5. After this buffering, the movie start. It runs smoothly for a little while, a few minutes. CPU usage = 50% (+/- 10%). Good.
6. After a few minutes, CPU load climbs up to 100%, vlc using 80% or 90% of it now. Obviously, it cannot display the movie and take care of the buffering at the same time without enough ressources. So the display starts chopping sounds and image. CPU usage = 100%
7. The funny thing : I press "pause". CPU goes back to 50%, and the movie plays smoothly during 10s (that's what was in the buffer obviously) and freeze after the 10th second. Then CPU usage is back to 10%.
8. Now if I press "play" again, 10s buffering, CPU=50%
9. movie plays (chopping sound & image), CPU=100% all the time (the few minutes that used to be ok in the beginning won't happen again before I restart my computer)
10. I press "pause" CPU=50% and movie plays smoothly 10s. Then it freezes and CPU=10%.
I stopped my antivirus, my firewall, and anything that's not useful (apache, mysql-nt...) but that doesn't change anything. vlc is the one using 80% or 90% of the CPU.
It looks like the problems comes from buffering and displaying the movie at the same time. But why does it work fine for a few minutes? Bad Memory Management?
Is it vlc's fault? (I'm not sure about it because other players have the same problem, BSplayer is not even able to show a clean image and freeze after a few seconds...)
Is it WinXP?
Or can it be a DirectX thing? (I run DirectX 9.0c)
I hope we'll be able to get rid of this.
Mlok.