X lags and hogs CPU when playing a DVD [SOLVED!]

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

For some reason, X starts lagging and takes up a huge amount of CPU power when playing a DVD (thus making the mouse and DVD badly lag)

The computer is a Dell E1505N laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo T5200 and NVidia GeForce Go 7300. When it ran Ubuntu, the DVDs played fine (even with wobbly windows) My other computer, Athlon XP (1.8 GHZ) also running Gentoo, with a pretty much similar setup, works fine.

Anyone know what could be the cause?

Thanks for your support!

Edit: Title change
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“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

RayDude

smasher · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 95

You may want to check and see if DMA is enabled on your DVD drive. See sys-apps/hdparm.

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

smasher · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 95

RayDude · Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 5:05 am Post subject:

I don't see anything wrong. GLX working means the driver is totally functional so it can't be the driver.

I agree with smasher, post the output of mplayer when you run it from the command prompt. Lets see if its using XV or XVMC like its supposed to be.

Raydude
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Some day there will only be free software.

jabol · Apprentice Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 269

It's certainly the lack of DMA. I see it's a laptop you have. I have ICH7 chip also and also can't run DMA yet. It seems that the way disks are done in laptops with ICH7 chips are a bit unsported yet. I didn't get to eneble DMA with same chip yet, I try to sth. like 2.6.27 kernel... Well, there were some topics about that on forum already if you want to try luck.

RayDude · Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 8:09 am Post subject:

X is taking the resource, not mplayer itself. I suspect its video / audio driver related. If mplayer is using X11 drawing, that would account for the high processor utilization.

As far as the DVD is concerned if you can't get DMA to run at least set the PIO mode as high as it will go.

Raydude
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Some day there will only be free software.

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Sorry I didn't reply for a few days - I was away...

RayDude · Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:53 pm Post subject:

I can't see anything wrong with the output of mplayer. I'll play a DVD tonight on my laptop to see what mplayer tells me and compare them.

For the heck of it could you try playing the DVD with xine and / or vlc?

I'm curious if they do a better job for you.

Raydude
_________________
Some day there will only be free software.

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Well, that complicated things a bit...

I emerged xine, and tried to watch a DVD. The movie still lags, and so does the mouse pointer. However, X does not take up any significant amount of CPU. Xine, however, does. It shows up as at least 6 processes in htop, and one takes up 30-40% and the second 20-30%.

_________________
“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

Try adding a file ~/.mplayer/config with:

RayDude · Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 11:56 pm Post subject:

Okay now I'm leaning toward /dev/hdc or its driver as the problem.

Try this:

Please note: substitute the drive device for your hard disk in this command.

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

It was the DMA and the funky ICH7 chip!!!

I googled for "ICH7 DMA DVD" and found this page:
http://thomer.com/howtos/dma_on_sata_dvd.html

I adjusted my kernel configuration:

RayDude · Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 12:54 am Post subject:

Good find!

If I understand correctly, you are using the scsi serial ata -> parallel ata drivers in the new kernel, right?

If so you then you should be able to disable the old parallel drivers and that should free up udev to figure out that sr0 is /dev/dvd.

I have this enabled on my ata dvd drive in my laptop and it works fine.

Its cool you found the problem, maybe someone who has this problem will find this thread and have a "Eureka!" moment.

Raydude
_________________
Some day there will only be free software.

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Found it: udev wries the rules for the cdrom in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules

I commented out the rules for the "old" cdrom and removed the "1"s from the rules for the "new" cdrom, and now everything is working as it is supposed to be!

Thanks everyone for your support!
_________________
“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931

UPDATE: If you have kernel 2.6.22+, you should not follow the steps above (in fact, if you have a problem and you found this thread, I recommend you upgrade the kernel)

For everything to work properly, make sure you have the old ATA drivers disabled:

andriy155 · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 65 Location: Kyiv, Ukraine

Great! Thank you so much. You helped a lot! Hopefully kernel 2.6.22 will get stable soon and nobody else will have the same problem.