Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 21:59:27 -0500 From: Randall Hopper <aa8vb@nc.rr.com> To: Gianluca Sordiglioni <gianluca@parkinson.it> Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: CPU power for DVD Message-ID: <20011117215927.B1892@nc.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <3BF66025.8C1D3B17@parkinson.it>; from gianluca@parkinson.it on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 02:03:33PM %2B0100 References: <3BF66025.8C1D3B17@parkinson.it>
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Just as a datapoint, I have an ATA DVD (Pioneer DVD-114) as well, and
I used to see hefty frame droppage (~20fps sustained) on my old
Pentium-MMX-class system, which didn't change at all when I replaced it
(keeping only a few periphs like the DVD drive) with a new ASUS A7M266,
Athlon 1.2GHz DDR 266MHz FSB, 512MB PC2100 DDR mem, all the latest bus
speed-ups, Matrox G450 DDR, etcetc. With the evidence I had, I figured my
DVD ROM just wasn't fast enough to keep up, or (more likely) FreeBSD's ATA
driver wasn't slick enough to coax it into fifth gear.
Then I tried mplayer. With Xv on my G450, full FPS even while CPU
utilization stays near zero when playing DVDs (and AVIs) scaled to full
screen at full FPS (I run at 1600x1200x16bpp). The DVD hickups are gone.
Might check:
> sysctl -a | grep atapi
hw.ata.atapi_dma: 1
Verify ATAPI DMA works well in your FreeBSD snapshot. Verify you've got
nothing on the same IDE channel that'd slow your CD ROM down (though both
not supporting it's fastest DMA mode, or eating bandwidth on that IDE
channel).
I use ATA66 IDE cables for my CDROM channel just for the heck of it. I
also put my HDs on the primary channel and the CDs on the secondary
channel.
Randall
Gianluca Sordiglioni:
| My machine is an Athlon 500Mhz, ATA DVD, ATI All-In-Wonder 128,
|SoundBlaster Live 1024, FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE, XFree86 4.1 compiled with
|XVideo, etc., using ati2 drivers from GATOS project.
|
| I always get frame drops playing DVDs, even using different software
|players. I tried ogle, mplayer, xine, and others. Even with ogle, the
|fastest player I tried, I can't get more than 20 FPS. Audio seems good
|(I use newpcm), no problems.
|
| I would like to know if my machine is fast enought to decompress DVD
|video, or perhaps I have some hardware or software problem. The ATA
|driver is using DMA to drive my DVD, so I can't see any bottleneck other
|than insufficient CPU power.
|
| It goes without saying that under Windows I have no problems; but,
|however, under Windows the video drivers can use the MPEG2-decoder chip
|on the graphic card to perform the task.
--
Randall Hopper
aa8vb@nc.rr.com
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