Disk Activity Causes Video Stuttering

[Simon Morgan]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 12:00:28PM +0100, Simon Morgan wrote:
> I'm having trouble with mplayer that seems to be highlighting a bug or general
> inefficiency in the ata driver when used with the VIA VT8235 chipset used in
> the ASUS A7V8X motherboard.
> 
> The problem is that whenever a video is being played and there is any
> reasonable amount of disk activity (e.g dd if=/dev/urandom of=test), the video
> skips and the mplayer status shows that it's had to drop frames to keep the
> video and audio in sync.

I've made some discoveries that discredit my previous assertion that the ata
driver is to blame. I created a memory disk using mdconfig and copied a video to
it and still got dropped frames when when performing the above command.

I had somebody who owns a different motherboard but which uses the same IDE
chipset to perform the same steps and he didn't experience any dropped frames.

-- 
Never let your schooling interfere with your education.