DVD ripping locks machine sporadically

Message

hammy · Post by **hammy** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 4:51 am

I'm using lxdvdrip to make DVD9->5 copies, but my system quickly becomes unresponsive during the DVD reading phase of the process. I have a Pioneer DVR-109 DVD-RW which has performed flawlessly until now. For an idea of what happens, I hear the DVD spin up in the drive, then I see some hard drive activity via the LED on my front panel, then things freeze for 5-10 seconds. It's not a full freeze; I can still move my mouse and drag windows around, but some apps freeze, music players lock, and open terminals are unresponsive. The DVD will spin down and the lock will be released. 20 seconds later the DVD will spin up again, soft lock my system, then spin down and unlock.

I can repeat the soft lock with any DVD backup program: dvdbackup, vobcopy, lxdvdrip, dvd::rip

I've repeated the problem with kernels gentoo-sources-2.6.19-r5 and 2.6.20. I have a VIA motherboard with a Samsung SP2004C SATA disk attached to it. The DVR-109 DVD burner is attached to the primary IDE channel.

I've run dstat -afv while the system locks, and it shows no read/write to the hard disk or the DVD burner. It feels like an I/O locking issue, but I'm not expert enough to debug the problem. Does anyone know what I should look into?

cylamanae · Post by **cylamanae** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 5:12 am

Hi make sure you have DMA enabled in your kernel options. If that does not help also check to make sure you have burning options enabled in your kernel. Also does this problem happen in older kernels such as gentoo-sources-2.6.18 or older?

hammy · Post by **hammy** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 5:23 am

cylamanae:

Thank you for your response. I will test out 2.6.18 and 2.6.17 to see if it's a release-level change. DMA is definitely enabled. Ripping an audio CD does not exhibit the same softlocking behavior. I will also try a standard data disc.

hammy · Post by **hammy** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 5:43 am

I tested vobcopy with a DVD I had burned beforehand with lxdvdrip. It does not exhibit the same locking behavior. I suspect something fishy is going on with libdvdread.

rapsure · Post by **rapsure** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 12:36 am

This is a weakness of the older IDE drivers. The temporary hanging is caused by io waiting to be processed in the kernel. This can happen when a timeout is waiting to occur with the dvd drive. This will especially happen with DVD's with bad sectors which includes nearly all of the DVD's made now. The newer drivers that are based on libata that are found in the 2.6.19 and 2.6.20 kernel doesn't exhibit this problem. Instead the rip will fail unless the software supports skipping bad sectors.