[gentoo-user] Choppy video playback

[Mike Mazur]

Hi,

I'm having choppy video playback in mplayer, vlc and also in Firefox
on YouTube and the like. I notice a video freeze every 1-2 seconds or
so, then the video snaps back to where it should be. The audio sounds
fine. Mplayer often spits out a warning message[1].

I also noticed that typing into forms (like an email in Gmail) in
Firefox, after Firefox has been running a few hours also suffers from
this freeze every 1-2 seconds.

A typical workload is Gnome, Firefox, Claws-Mail, Pidgin, Tomboy,
xmms2 and a bunch of terminals with SSH sessions and irssi.

I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz with 2 GB of RAM, so this shouldn't be
happening. I'm running kernel 2.6.23-gentoo-r3. I don't remember when
exactly this started, I don't really watch video too often.

Could it be the scheduler with which my kernel is compiled? Currently
it's set to "Preemptible Kernel (Low-Latency Desktop)".

Any ideas? What to start tweaking with?

Thanks for any help,
Mike


[1] Mplayer warning message:
           ************************************************
           **** Your system is too SLOW to play this!  ****
           ************************************************

Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
  - Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
  - Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
  - Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
  - Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts,
    e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
  - Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
  - Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
  - Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.
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