Recent poor DVD playback performance

[spmirowski]

>
>>>>> >>>>I have FC5 and recently my DVD playback has tanked.
>>>>> >>>>
>>>>> >>>>Both xine and mplayer (from livna and greysector repos respectively) act 
>>>>> >>>>like they cannot read the dvd fast enough. Xine plays for about 10 
>>>>> >>>>seconds and then freezes for a a second or two, plays some more and then 
>>>>> >>>>freezes again. Meanwhile the disk led is dark with minimal activity. The 
>>>>> >>>>same thing happens with a mounted DVD in the DVD-ROM drive. So it is not 
>>>>> >>>>my disk. Mplayer complains that "Your system is too SLOW to play this!"
>>>>> >>>>
>>>>> >>>>It is a 800Mhz athlon with 256MB memory and a nvidia tnt2 AGP using the 
>>>>> >>>>nv driver. Although it is older machine, this system was great at 
>>>>> >>>>playing DVDs up until a couple of weeks ago. So I suspect a yum update 
>>>>> >>>>might have done something. Before this, I have been playing DVDs on it 
>>>>> >>>>happily for a couple of years from RH9, to FC4 and now FC5.
>>>>> >>>>
>>>>> >>>>Anyone have some ideas for me to try oir areas to explore?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>> -
>>> >what does top tell you? Where is your cpu power getting sucked away?
>>> >beagled?
>>> >  
>>> >
>>>       
> Top says Xorg0 @ 68%, mplayer @ 28%.
>
> Nothing much else is in the way.

Maybe it's just me, but I think Xorg R7 cause a few performance issues.  
FC4 ran DVDs on xine just fine
(IBM lapper, 800 Mhz, ATi video).  But FC5 was unusable for video 
performance on that lapper.  I think
it might have to do with the modularization of R7 or perhaps something 
goofy with the open sauce drivers.
Or it could have been the new gslice for Gnome (well, there's many 
possibilities).

- Recommend going to nVidia legacy drivers. 
- Strange thing, just 'cause hdparm says DMA is on, doesn't seem to make 
it so (thus: hdparm -d1 /dev/hdX)
- Compile xine-lib and ui yerself. (my personal preference)

Stephen