Sporadic choppy playback

[doro1211]

I just installed VideoLAN Client 0.6.0 on my system. For the most part it works, but the playback is very choppy. Every 2s or so, at very regular intervals, it freezes up for about a half second. It plays the beginning of the disc ok, but at the same point on the disc each time the choppiness begins.

This is not related to lack of system resources. I am running Red Hat Linux 8.0 on an Athlon 2100+ with 1 GB RAM and a GForce 4 card (I have installed the hardware acceleration drivers from NVidia). When playing DVD's, the CPU usage percent never goes above 25% on the system monitor; the system isn't strained by the playback. In fact, I can run compiles and other applications in the background with no slowdown, just the same choppiness. The system is dual boot and the DVD player has no problems in Windows 2k.

I get the following errors in the xterm I run it from:
main interface error: option frequency does not exist
main interface error: option symbol-rate does not not exist

Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be?

Thanks in advance.

[The DJ]

The errors are just because you aren't using the wxwindows interface. The GTK/QT/GNOME/KDE interfaces are outdated.

You should upgrade to 0.6.2 or even better 0.7.0-test2 and make sure all libraries VLC uses (about 15) are also at the latest and greatest version. When you want to use Video software on linux you will always need to have the latest of the latest.

[Dnumgis]

The errors are totally unrelated, and are completly harmless. I think the most probable reason is the dma is not enabled on the drive. The faq tell you how to fix that.

[doro1211]

I think that the problem is that DMA is not enabled. I've beet attempting to enable it. This is what I'm getting:

[root@localhost /dev]$ /sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/dvd

/dev/dvd:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

Has anyone seen this?

Thanks again for the advice.

[doro1211]

Nevermind, I got it to work.

I had to modify /etc/modules.conf and /etc/sysconfig/harddisks to enable DMA.

With DMA enabled the picture is smooth. Good catch, thanks for the advice.