Thomas Halahan wrote:
I don't understand why I can't get my K6-2 400MHz, and Rage
IIC greaphics card to give good playback. In the DVD howto
I see that you need io ctrl in the Kernel. Could it be
that I do't have this feature enabled? Is it really that
critical.
I guess I want to know what is the likely weakest link in
my setup as I really know nothing about hardware.
Tom
I just recently started playing with DVD on my Linux box, and it was
horribly, unwatchably jumpy. Then early one morning as I was about half
an hour before waking up, still kindda in that dream state, I remembered
hdparm.
At my work I had seen jumpy DVD playback on Windows machines, and
turning on DMA access helped. So I ran the command:
sudo hdparm -c1 -d1 -X34 /dev/dvd
and that made a tremendous difference.
The -c1 turns on 32-bit addressing, and the -d1 turns on DMA access, and
the -X34 was recommended by the man pages when using -d1. /dev/dvd is a
symlink to /dev/cdrom which is a symlink to /dev/hdc which is where my
dvd/cd drive sits.
HTH
Kent
Video RAM is nearly irrelevant. Anything with 2MB can do
1024x768/16-bit which is what you want for DVD. For
film-source DVDs you want 72Hz or 96Hz refresh so you
need a RAMDAC of 82MHz or 110MHz respectively. The other
consideration for video cards is that it really must have
an implementation of Xvideo for XFree86, hardware color
space conversion, hardware scaling, and it must have
enough video memory bandwidth to convert/scale at
1024x768/16.
Briefly: you need at least a Matrox Millenium (c. 1995).
Regarding the rest of the system, any 350MHz+ CPU with a
vector math unit will work. Pentium II/III/IV, Celeron,
Duron, K6, Athlon, G4 should be fine. Once you get to
zero dropped frames, there isn't a lot of point in piling
more hardware on.
-jwb