Re: FC4/Xine dropped frame rate

On 4 Dec 2005 03:54:56 -0800, PMR staggered into the Black Sun and said:
> FC4 and Xine 0.99.4 on an AMD Sempron 64 3000+ (1.8GHz) with 1G (-64mb
> shared graphics). Whenever I try to play any video in Xine, it is
> very jerky and then the 'dropped frame rate too high' message appears
> and Xine then normally freezes.

"Shared memory" video adapters almost always suck in many ways. The
first thing to do is to make sure you're using the right X module. Look
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf , look for the Device section, look at the Driver
line in that section. If it's "vesa", you're going to get a lousy
framerate on everything. If you have an Intel video chip, it should be
"i810". If you have an SiS video chip, it should probably be "savage".
If you don't know what video chip you have, "/sbin/lspci | grep VGA"
will tell you.

> I've followed the xine-check idea from the xine website and it
> suggests updating xine-libs. Xine was installed via RPM with yum, so I
> can't work out how to do this.

Read the manual for FC4's excuse for a package manager? There are going
to be several packages that match .*xine.* , so you might want to rpm
-qa | grep xine or something, then see if there's a newer xine-libs RPM
and try rpm -Uvh on that. I'll bet it's not that, but a misconfigured
X. If you don't have XV, things get choppy. Also, if you have the
(semi-rare) i740 video chip, you need to run in 16-bit color, or you get
no acceleration.

> Xine used to work 100% on my very low-spec laptop with the same
> OS/config that was also installed via yum.

Your laptop had a different video chip in it.

> I wasn't expecting this on such a high spec machine!

Why does a "high spec machine" have a shared-memory video adapter?

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
.

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