video playback has lag

[Thingie]

Hi,

When I play a dvd or a avi file the move halts for a very small time and then continues. It happens 2 to 3 times a minute and it's really unpleasant watching a movie like this. Below you'll find my pc specs but I think they should be enough.

Specs:

Intel Core 2 4300 @ 1,8GHz
1Gb RAM
Two Gigabit Nic's connected to Gigabit switches
Geforce 7600 GT 256MB

Anyone has the sme probs or know what to do please help

Thx

[dopey]

The hardware specs are more than adequate to play a DVD. There are a lot of thing that can cause this though. What is your network setup? What video drivers are you using? Do you have Hardware Render Acceleration turned on? Basically, what are the settings for the media directory as it is listed in the media director tab in the admin web page?

[Hagen]

Those specs sounds ok.
But you didn't specify the media you where playing and from where?

Was it a HD-DVD, ripped/digital HD media?
Remote storage or local, did you play it on the core or on a MD?

[Thingie]

Ok,

maybe I gave to little information.
The lag is there always. first I thought it was because I played it from my NAS-drive (WDC Mybook World 500GB: don't buy this because it's a TERRIBLE product) but when I copied a file local the same happens. There is also no difference between the different formats, DVD, avi or a HD-file it's all laggy in the same way. Below you'll find a picture of my mediadirector settings. I played with the settings but there is no difference in the lag. I stays the same, not worse not better. I also tried to play the files with kaffeine in the KDE desktop, same result. A last maybe I should try to explain what I mean with lag. The sound and picture stay perfect synchronized but every 10 to 20 sec the video halts for a fraction of a second ands continues normally.

[dopey]

Those settings look fine to me (I set the hardware acceleration to xv, but that shouldn't be causing your problem). That, also, doesn't necessarily mean that X is actually using those settings... although in theory it should. Can you post your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) and the Xorg.log file (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) ? Also, could you please post the result of the following command, as a dvd is playing. You will likely have to do this from an ssh session.

Code: [Select]

free -m
The reason I ask for the last command is because I have had difficulty in the past with skipping video when I was using most of my memory and swap (if it was even activated). I haven't had this issue in LinuxMCE (especially with specs like that), so this might not be it, but it wouldn't hurt to check...

[Thingie]

Hope this is the right way of posting this, if you want it different let me know.

I only seem to have 62MB free of my 1GB and my swap is not used. Is this normal?

Thx
Thingie

[Zaerc]

Look at the "-/+ buffers/cache:" line, that's the real memory usage, the rest is (mainly) being used for dynamic disk cache.  So in reality you're not even using half of the memory.

[Thingie]

Ok,

the strangest thing just happend. My NAS drive, which was already detected configured and working, was detected again. Because I had been playing around a bit with pluto I entered the username and pw again. Looking on the Admin page I noticed my NAS was presented twice with the devices. I checked if this was having any influence in the orbitter and whatte you know, the video lag was gone. Not knowing why it was fixed I was very pleased. So I tried a few different formats and they all worked like a bliss. But then my moies on the nas dissapeard from my list. I checked the drive but it was running just fine. So I deleted the two NAS devices on the admin page and waited for Orbitter to detect it again and it did. So now all my movies are back in the list and playing but the lag is back. I never gave it much attention but with the lag gone for a while I noticed that the photogallery in the orbitter is showing the same lag. This was also gone and returned. I have no idea why the NAS was redetected again because I was doing nothing at the time and the drive is more then a week on the system. Any ideas?

[Thingie]

Tired of trying to find the cause of my lag I decided to take out an older pcI had lying around and installed LinuxMCE on this one. Now everything is running fine and there is no lag anymore. It still remains a mysterie but I don't give a sh*t anymore.

Thx everyone for the replies.