DVD software

[Bill Fink]

On Thu Aug 1 2002, Shawn Coomey wrote:

> Well... an update on my side. Recompiling to disable Altivec on my G3 
> enabled video. Sounds as was mentioned is hosed, however. Just static 
> through the speakers.
> 
> First thing I noticed is that I am only able to get 1-2 frames/sec. Even 
> Xine was better. Any ideas?

Hi Shawn,

I don't think you will be able to do better than xine performance wise.
All DVD software players have to do basically the same things and xine
is already highly optimized.  A G3 400 is just rather marginal to watch
DVDs.

Run xine-check to see if it suggests any performance improvements.
A few other things you could possibly do are to enable DRI if your
video card supports it, which has the side effect of enabling DMA
for Xv (make sure xine is using the Xv video driver) which gives
about a 33% performance improvement.  You can also try reducing the
resolution and/or bit depth, especially if not using DRI/DMA since
this should reduce copying overhead.  I think you only really need
640x480 at 16 bit depth to watch DVDs.

						-Bill

P.S.  A new 0.9.13 version of xine should be released in the next few
      days from:

      http://xine.sourceforge.net/