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

[Nevyn]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Simon Bridge <simonbridge at ihug.co.nz> wrote:
>
>  On Sun, 2008-05-04 at 17:22 +1200, Patrick Connolly wrote:
>  > [ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI.
>  >          This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation.
>  >          If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely
>  >          to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this.
>  >          However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is
>  >          disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable
>  >          DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance
>  >          loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution)
>  >
>  >
>  > Something is incomplete in that hint.
>
>  Nope - it's telling you what has been suspected: DMA is not active.
>  ATAPI support for optical drives is pretty good now, scsi emulation
>  should not be needed.
>
>  You probably have a "hdc=ide-scsi" in your menu.lst ... remove it.
>  Re-run xine-check and it will have advice about turning on DMA.

Had a bit of search after reading that message. It seems that you
can't control DMA using the ide-scsi module. There is a fix but it's
long, convoluted, and I'm not at all convinced that it'd work. It
involves unloading modules, loading modules, setting dma, unloading
modules, reloading the original modules. Sounds like a horrible dirty
hack to me.

Do us a favour, type in:
hdparm /dev/cdrom

If the last line comes up as something along the lines of:
"HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device"

you've got much the same thing that my system is doing. I'm not sure
if this is a problem for my system as I've only just noticed that
hdparm doesn't work on it. From a post I've read, hdparm only works on
/dev/hd? devices.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure that dma is your issue as if DVD's play
normally in one application but not so well in another, then it's more
likely to be something wrong with the way the application is trying to
do things.