I've just recently installed R4v4.1 on my machine, and the install went smoothly, with two hitches. The first is that DVD playback is choppy. I can enable DMA on the DVD-ROM drive using hdparm, but it makes no difference whether DMA is on or off, playback is still choppy. Looking at top output, it appears mplayer is only taking 10-20% of CPU usage during DVD playback, so I'm assuming the problem is in reading the disc rather than the processing of the video. Is there another setting other than DMA that I should be aware of?

The second problem is that I enabled Samba, but the performance is horrible. It's hooked to my desktop machine via a 100BT network, and is taking around forty minutes (or more) to transfer a couple hundred meg file. Transferring files between other machines on the same network are orders of magnitude faster.

These things used to work fine on this machine, running some older version of Knoppmyth R4 (I don't remember which one). Hardware specs are as follows:
Athlon XP 1600+
NForce (not NForce 2) motherboard
Using onboard video, network, and sound. (I get the same Samba problem with a separate NIC)
Hauppauge WinTV 401
Lite-On DVD-ROM drive
160GB Seagate HDD

Any help would be appreciated.

well samba seems fine here, however dvd playback is a TINY bit chopy.. i also enabled dma on my dvd drive, and it didnt help. i am pretty sure there is levels of DMA, is this right? its 95% there but playback isnt smooth during panning shots. but a talking head shot would look perfect. is that your problem..

i am using xine.

I am using R4 and I have the same problem.

Shots with movement e.g. talking etc are fine. Once a shot is panned the DVD playback is jerky. I am using;

Athlon 2100+
Geforce 440MX
512
200GB HDD
24x DVD

I have issued the command: HDPARM -d 1 /dev/hdc doesn't really help much.

good so im not the only one! my system.

amd 3000+
1 gig ram
via kt6 delta mobo
200 gig hd

i compiled my xine from source.. didnt help either.

phase1 are you using mplayer for dvd playback.. or xine or something else??

I was using Mplayer for DVD playback, I then compiled and have switched to Xine to see if this solved the problem...unfortunatly still jerky. I would recommend Xine for DVD playback (Far better menu support )

I am still looking into the issues.. I have tried all hdparm settings etc etc but this doesn't solve the problem.

Also be aware that if you use Xine special parameters are required because it breaks tv playback (blank screen).

I will post anything I find useful.

Phase1 ..

BTW I Might be forced to try a bios upgrade to see if that helps.

Actually at this point i would recoment ripping the dvd, then watching it. because at least on my system xine/mplayer cant quite play DVD's fully smooth. Im sure at some point someone / I will figure out why. Like we say in the winblows world: Somewhere 3 pages deep is a "Be stupid" check-box just waiting to be unchecked.

Odd I should find this discussion. I was just playing my already-ripped DVD last night on R4V4.1 and noticed that there are small jerks in the ripped playback. The system is Athlon 2500 w/nForce2 and integrated MX440. I'm using XvMC and nVidia drivers. All drives are set to DMA. CPU is only about 5-10% so I'm pretty sure that's not the problem!

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humm i had a problem like this but it wouldnt play, and when i finaly found a way for it to play it was playing at like 2 frames a second so EXTREEMLY choppy and what it was is me a and a firend were modifying the lilo file and dissabled the scsi emulation
so i added it back in and reinstalled lilo and that fixed my problem

im not sure what the line u need is and im not handy to my mythbox atm to get the line but im sure some one can help on what u need in there
if thats the problem

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Kaziya

HTPC:

Asus Motherboard A7V8X-X
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (333FSB)
256MB DDR PC2700
Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti 200
WinTV-PVR-250MCE
Logitech wireliss MXDuo (keyboard and mouse)
Ati Remote Wonder

i have a similar setup, but dont use XvMC. my system has been in use 3 months.. (dozens of movies) never seen a ripped movie studer/jitter. only live DVD movies..

amd 2800+
Gforce4MX
512 ram
etc...

Same here. No XvMC and xine works great for me. Very similar hardware too.

Just to follow up:

I reinstalled with the new R4v5 release, and I'm having pretty much the same problems. DVD playback is choppy, video (AVI & MPEG) playback is choppy (although the sound is fine), Samba performance is unacceptable. I can still find no reason for the performance hit, since MPlayer is taking less than 5% of CPU time when playing back video

In addition, when I select "Watch TV" from the menu, the system hangs with a black screen. It's still works if I SSH in, or Ctrl-Alt-Bksp and restart X, but the interface locks up and I don't get any TV. Looking through the dmesg output, I see it's full of errors

I get pretty much the same results whether I have XvMC installed or not.

i have not tried any dvds yet so i can't comment on that problem. but, i too am having terrible samba performance now. that has not always been the case.

when i first installed r4v4.1, i had my pvr250 in pci slot 1 and my 3c905cx-txm nic in pci slot 2. i could play low bitrate mp3 over the network on my windows box. when i tried to play some high bitrate flac files, i would get a stutter every 5-6 seconds. lspci -v showed the pvr250 and the capture card were using irg 9, so i moved the nic to pci slot 3. the nic moved to irq 10. i could then play the high bitrate flac files. i could even play the captured mpg files in the "pretty" directory over the network to my windows box.

something has changed now and i'm not sure what. i shut the box down two or threes times over the past two weeks, but i had not changed any hardware or software. i can still play low bitrate mp3, but flacs are stuttering again. trying to play the mpgs cause windows media player to hang. i tried copying a 30mb file to my windows box and the progress dialog box showed 50 minutes remaining, so i cancelled the transfer. my myth frontend is out of commision now, so i can't test it's performance.

i was not sure what to do next, so i tried i an intel e100 nic. same problems. how can i trouble-shoot this?

Hardware specs are as follows:
Celeron 733
Asus i810 motherboard
Using onboard video and sound.
3com 3c905cx-txm nic (i tried an intel e100 too)
Hauppauge PVR250-Freestyle
Asus 50x CD-ROM drive
40GB WD HDD
160GB Samsung HDD

looks like the problems was with my windows box. imagine that. anyway, when samba was working right, i had knoppmyth set to be browse master with a 255 priority. that way it would always win any browse master elections with windows boxes. just to be safe, i had the computer browser service turned off on my xp box so it could not be browse master.

when i shutdown my knoppmyth box, i hooked up a win98 box in it's place. i then turned the computer browser service back on in my xp box to temporarily speed up network browsing. when i finished with the win98 box, i hooked the knoppmyth box up again WITHOUT disabling computer browser service on my xp box. i had the poor samba performance from then on.

i just disabled computer browser service on my xp box and rebooted. samba is now performing as it should. hope that is your problem too syd, because the fix is easy.