[nzlug] Xine on Fedora 8: does it work for anyone?

[Patrick Connolly]

Somewhere about Sun, 04-May-2008 at 12:36AM +1200 (give or take), Nevyn wrote:

|> On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 6:14 PM, Simon Bridge <simonbridge at ihug.co.nz> wrote:
|> >
|> >  Nope - we now know that you are very unlikely to be running a 3D driver.
|> >  I'll bet that the CPU use goes through the ceiling when you try to watch
|> >  a DVD.
|> 
|> About the dma settings...
|> 
|> If you go into the console and type in:
|> hdparm -d /dev/cdrom
|> 
|> it should tell you whether dma is set on or off (doesn't appear to do
|> it on my system for whatever reason). From there you'll need to put it

Doesn't tell me anything.  I get a blank line, and then /dev/cdrom
which I suppose means it's not on.


|> about the video card:
|> 
|> To check if you CPU goes through the roof, open up a console, type
|> "top" and watch what happens when you try to run xine. The line at the
|> top for CPU(s), specifically the id field (stands for idle). If the
|> idle field goes down at a serious rate, then it implies that 3d
|> features aren't being used on your video card.

Thanks for that info.  The level for id drops quite a bit.  There's
not much difference between Xine and Kaffeine, BUT there's a big
difference it makes to the %CPU used by X.  Kaffeine makes a small
difference, but Xine it goes up to 80% for X alone.  So that seems to
be consistent with what you say.


|>  If that's the problem, then we need to look at changing your video
|> card drivers.

Yes.  I'm looking into the kmod-fglrx driver.



|> other options:
|> 
|> I used to use mplayer and found that performance changed
|> dramatically depending on the output plugin I used. I'm not sure if
|> xine offers you different output plugin options but it's worth
|> while having a look.

There's a fair few skins on this cat to look at yet.

Thanks for the tips.

best



-- 
   ___     Patrick Connolly      
 {~._.~}   
 _( Y )_          Good judgment comes from experience 
(:_~*~_:)         Experience comes from bad judgment    
 (_)-(_)