[mythtv-users] Occasional jerkiness during DVD playback

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sat Jun 23 21:18:36 UTC 2007


Juergen Botz wrote:
> I have an EPIA SP based Myth box.  I have XvMC working and video
> playback is usually very smooth and using only about 20% CPU.
> But when playing DVDs, once in a while, usually on scene changes
> where the whole field is different, I get a few seconds of jerky
> video and stuttering sound.
> 
> What could be causing this?

Lots of things.

You are probably running into some sort of resource limitation. This
might be CPU, RAM, I/O or "something else".

If you are getting your "20%" CPU load number from top, remember that it
is an average, and the peak usage might be well in excess of that.

How fast is your CPU?

You might be hitting swap, which will really slow things down.

Are you playing the DVD within Myth?

I'd start by playing the DVD outside of Myth, with as little else
running as possible, and see if you get the same problem. If it's OK,
and re-appears as you add more running apps, you might need to think
about a lighter-weight window manager (or no window manager) or
otherwise reducing resource load.

This assumes that the DVD itself is OK. More than likely it is, but I
have seen some purportedly "commercial" DVD that were encoded pretty poorly.

BEWW


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