[PlanetCCRMA] DVD playback not fluent

[Mike Artis]

> > when i play a movie with MPLAYER, i get dropped frames as well as
> > what appears as 20x20 pixel checkerboard 'blocks' on the screen,
> > filled with very coarse imaging. its clearly not keeping up with
> > decoding or so. i tried playing around with the settings, but with
no
> > luck.
> >
> > cpu usage doesn't really exceed 50% during playback.
> >
> > my questions:
> > * how do i know if the hardware accellerated driver for nVidia is
> > installed or not? (RH menu above seems to indicate yes, but i think
> > no)

It may also not be video drivers causing the problem.  Have you checked
to see whether DMA is enabled on the DVD drive?

Try hdparm -d /dev/dvd to see if it's enabled.  If not, it will really
help latency if you enable it by issuing this command: hdparm -d 1
/dev/dvd.

Read the hdparm man page for more options you can add to set ide disk
parameters.  

/Mike