Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Forums
Quick Search: in
Ultra 10 DVD playback performance
View unanswered posts
View posts from last 24 hours

 
Reply to topic    Gentoo Forums Forum Index Gentoo on Sparc
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
mrichmon
n00b
n00b


Joined: 17 Dec 2003
Posts: 21

PostPosted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 5:44 pm    Post subject: Ultra 10 DVD playback performance Reply with quote

I've spent the past week installing and emerging gentoo on my 440MHz Ultra 10 with an Elite3D, and it works! :D

I'm happily running Gnome 2.4 and have patched the X windows install to fix the openGL seg fault in libGL.so.1.2.

This machine is intended to me my home fileserver and hopefully a DVD playback box. At the moment dvd playback is a little slow. So I'm wondering if anyone has some tunning suggestions which may squeeze decent playback out of the machine.

At worst I could try getting a hollywood plus card working in this box and just run the video off the onboard mach64. But I'd prefer to stay with the Elite3D if I can get the playback working well.

I can also report the following non-Sun hardware working well on this machine:
Belkin USB + Firewire PCI card - provides 2 USB and 2 Firewire ports,
Apple USB Professional Keyboard,
Logitech USB trackball.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
hoochiepapa
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 02 Oct 2002
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 7:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If this were wintel hardware I would suggest running hdparm to enable dma

However I believe the ultra10 is an IDE box, you could try it.

glad to hear of success with SPARC HW, I've been thinking of trying to install on my sunblade.

BTW, I built ogle on my blade100, DVD playback is worthless.
I wonder if SPARC hardware has the throughput for fast DVD playback.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mrichmon
n00b
n00b


Joined: 17 Dec 2003
Posts: 21

PostPosted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 10:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've checked and hdparm reports that DMA is turned on on both my DVD and CDR drives. Although the IOsupport is at 16bits - I've been able to set it to support 32 bits so I'll see if it has improved playback when I get
home.

The alternative is to plug the DVD into a UDMA card I'm installing in this
box over the weekend. (Or to get the i2c drivers compiled into the kernel.) =)

This is rapidly becoming a cargo-cult sparc linux box. :D
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mrichmon
n00b
n00b


Joined: 17 Dec 2003
Posts: 21

PostPosted: Sat Dec 20, 2003 2:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Update in DVD playback:

I've found that I have smooth playback most of the time using xine now
that I went through the XView install described on

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=116599&sid=dd529f0be96d853fc4a8cfa6a1194526

I tried this out with the intention of using the onboard video card, however the ati driver still refuses to load for the onboard video card. However, the libext patches have significantly increased playback rate.

Now, we just need to get the ffb driver to perform hardware YUV->RGB conversion and everything should be rosey.

Update: using mplayer I get smooth playback without any skipping. The only drawback is that very bright highlights are rendered as a rainbow of changing colors. I think the color space mapping is being messed up but I'm not sure how to fix it.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mrichmon
n00b
n00b


Joined: 17 Dec 2003
Posts: 21

PostPosted: Sat Dec 20, 2003 3:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

DVD playback with mplayer is stable with the correct correct colors if I use

mplayer -vo x11 vf rgb2bgr=swap

However, at full screen playback is not smooth. This seems to be a data path issue since the cpu isn't heavily loaded.

Using xine to play via shm with a large buffer has produced the best results I've found.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
hoochiepapa
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 02 Oct 2002
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Sat Dec 20, 2003 3:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Making me more and more want to try it on the sunblade.
How's native solaris compatibility? I will need to run at least one solaris app.
the show-stopper is the lack of a sunpci card driver.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
mrichmon
n00b
n00b


Joined: 17 Dec 2003
Posts: 21

PostPosted: Sat Dec 20, 2003 5:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't tried native solaris apps - though I've turned on the kernel compatibility options. When I drop a new drive into the box this weekend I may hook up my old solaris drive and test out a few apps.

I have noticed a significant speed improvement with the move to linux from solaris 8. I think this is because most of my use of the machine now is workstation type stuff - scripts, compiling, etc. When I ran solaris on it I was mostly doing server development and so cared more about the OS than the performance.

Gnome 2.4 is running nicely, and the DVD playback issues appear to be data transfer related so moving the DVD drive to the firewire bus should help that.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Emphii
n00b
n00b


Joined: 08 Oct 2004
Posts: 46

PostPosted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 10:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

(mrichmon)
I can also report the following non-Sun hardware working well on this machine:
Belkin USB + Firewire PCI card - provides 2 USB and 2 Firewire ports

-------------

What Belkin card you had?
_________________
/tmp.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic    Gentoo Forums Forum Index Gentoo on Sparc All times are GMT
Page 1 of 1

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum