dvd is jerky

[blobaugh]

my dvd drive is acting up. the music and video is all jerky. im running top at the same time and only 15% of my proc is being used. any idea why this would be happening?

[je_fro]

Are you running as root by chance?

[tecknophreak]

Make sure you're not running anything in the background which might be taking up CPU or memory.

If you are running it as root, try using nice to give the dvd player a higher priority.

[retsaw]

Try enabling readahead on you dvd drive using hdparmhdparm -d1 -a8 -u1 <dvd device>this command will enable readahead, dma and irq unmasking, they all should help, read the hdparm manpage for more details.
Also tryecho file_readahead:2000000 > /proc/ide/[dvd device]/settings
I got these from the mplayer documentation. I think it was enabling readahead with hdparm that helped me, but I'm not sure.

[blobaugh]

thanks retsaw, that hdparm command seemed to fix it. that explains also why my sound recording program is screwing up too, i dont have dma enabled

and je_fro, i was running as root when i did that

[blobaugh]

hrm, it _seemed_ to fix it. every 15-20 minutes it gets jerky and stops playing for about 20 seconds. also i dont have dma enabled on my hard drive, would that affect playback at all?

[rocketpcguy]

a bit off topic (dont know nothing about dvds) but having DMA on your hard drive can give you a general speed gain, you can compare the performance with "/sbin/hdparm -Tt /dev/hda"

[blobaugh]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy
a bit off topic (dont know nothing about dvds) but having DMA on your hard drive can give you a general speed gain, you can compare the performance with "/sbin/hdparm -Tt /dev/hda"

no thats not off topic at all, i have a feeling that all my problems are based around not have dma enabled on this particular machine. i was planning on enabling dma on the harddrive today in fact, but i still want to figure out what is up with the dvd