Stuttery Video Playback

[Anthony Agelastos]

I assume it is a DVD that is causing you grief. When you built  
MPlayer (I assumed that based on whom you sent this email), what make  
arguments did you pass? Since you built it, have you portupgraded?  
What I am trying to get at is I don't think your MPlayer installation  
is optimized. As an example, in my /ust/local/etc/pkgtools.conf file,  
I have the following MAKE_ARGS for mplayer:

     'multimedia/mplayer' => [
       'WITH_OPTIMIZED_CFLAGS=yes',
       'WITHOUT_RUNTIME_CPUDETECTION=yes',
       'WITH_KERN_HZ=512',
       'WITH_DVD_DEVICE=/dev/acd0',
       'WITH_CDROM_DEVICE=/dev/acd1',
       'WITH_CDPARANOIA=yes',
       'WITH_LIBCACA=yes',
       'WITH_MAD=yes',
       'WITH_THEORA=yes',
       'WITH_AALIB=yes',
       'WITH_THEORA=yes',
       'WITH_TREMOR=yes',
       'WITH_SDL=yes',
       'WITHOUT_ESOUND=yes',
       'WITH_VORBIS=yes',
       'WITH_REALPLAYER=yes',
       'WITH_XANIM=yes',
       'WITH_LIVEMEDIA=yes',
       'WITH_MATROSKA=yes',
       'WITH_XVID=yes',
       'WITH_LZO=yes',
       'WITH_XMMS=yes',
       'WITH_DTS=yes',
     ],

Those top three make args are what allows my PIII 450 MHz machine to  
play a DVD just fine. With those in their proper place in  
pkgtools.conf (near the bottom in the MAKE_ARGS section), you can  
portinstall or portupgrade mplayer and it will always be built with  
those flags. I hope this helps.

On Jun 24, 2006, at 8:15 AM, Simon Morgan wrote:

> Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope!
>
> Ok, so I'm having real trouble playing videos under either FreeBSD  
> or OpenBSD.
> Playback on OpenBSD is really choppy/stuttery, FreeBSD is a lot  
> better but still
> enough to be annoying. I only have access to a FreeBSD installation  
> right now so
> I'll stick with that.
>
> It's worth mentioning that the machine in question is more than up  
> to the task
> of playing video:
>
> CPU: AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2000+ (1658.54-MHz 686-class CPU)
> real memory  = 1073725440 (1023 MB)
> avail memory = 1041784832 (993 MB)
>
> This is backed up by the fact that I don't get this problem under  
> Linux.
>
> The closest I can come to a test case is running:
>
>   dd if=/dev/urandom of=blah
>
> while a video is playing. Under FreeBSD this causes the video to  
> freeze for a
> second and the dropped frame counter to increase by a varying  
> number of frames.
> Linux, however, just keeps ticking along nicely.
>
> I've tried swapping the video card between an ATI 9200 and NVIDIA  
> GeForce 4 and
> swapping the sound card between a VIA VT8235 and a CMedia CMI8738  
> but neither
> helped.
>
> I'm pretty sure that nobody that reads this will be able to  
> reproduce this
> problem but at least it means I have a way of easily testing things  
> if somebody
> is kind enough to help me try and resolve this problem.
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> -- 
> One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
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