DVD Playback Problem: How Do I Configure the Buffer?
I've been watching DVDs using Trisquel a whole lot lately. I'm using Totem (and sometimes other players) to play them back, and I've noticed if I ever pause or rewind, my optical drive spins down and doesn't start back up again until playback reaches the end of the buffer. This causes playback to freeze for a few seconds, and then it jumps ahead a few seconds requiring me to rewind to catch what I missed. It doesn't make things unwatchable, but it results in not-very-good performance.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Are there settings somewhere I can tweak to see if I can mitigate it?
Don't watch DVDs so don't have any experience.
Maybe one could use hdparm as a workaround. But don't destroy your system with it! :)
On 21/08/2013 06:17 AM, name at domain wrote:
> I've been watching DVDs using Trisquel a whole lot lately. I'm using
> Totem (and sometimes other players) to play them back, and I've
> noticed if I ever pause or rewind, my optical drive spins down and
> doesn't start back up again until playback reaches the end of the
> buffer. This causes playback to freeze for a few seconds, and then it
> jumps ahead a few seconds requiring me to rewind to catch what I
> missed. It doesn't make things unwatchable, but it results in
> not-very-good performance.
>
> Has anyone else run into this problem? Are there settings somewhere I
> can tweak to see if I can mitigate it?
Well I use smplayer to watch videos and it has cache settings which you
can increase that might help.
@lembas: what is the point in replying when one has nothing to reply ? ;)
/me seriously asking...
@EricxDu:
totem does not exactly have the best reputation as media player. I also usually use either SMPlayer or VLC. They both provide sufficient buffering to get a got experience when playing back files from optical media. Be it DVDs or HD stuff burned to BDs.
Sometimes though the optical drive and / or the media might have issues with quick spin up time. Even when using a standalone DVD player on the cheap models there is often a small hickup when you have paused the video and restart it.
I do not know if you have any special options to finetune the behaviour of VLC / SMPlayer in regard of buffering / read ahead.
HTH,
Holger
Thanks, sachin, for the suggestion of SMPlayer. I've looked for such options in Totem and don't think there are any at all.
Darksoul71: thanks for the info and two reasons I might be having this problem. I'll definitely give SMPlayer and/or VLC a go, and see if my optical drive has slow spinup and still causes issues. I suppose Trisquel includes Totem by default because it's the Gnome standard app, so any shortcomings it may have is why we have choices available.
I just did a quick check and realized that MPlayer (which SMPlayer is a front-end to) and VLC don't depend on the GStreamer plugin, which is what Totem is based on. Perhaps GStreamer is what doesn't buffer well. If I'm not mistaken, GStreamer is a plugin that handles decoding various video formats.
AFAIK GStreamer is a multimedia framework / backend to make developing AV applications easier. Both mplayer and VLC share libav for decoding videos.
I just mentioned that totem does not exactly have a good reputation because I have seen several complaints in various message boards about different issues (stuttering, async audio & video and so on). It also never worked to my full convenvience.
Especially HD stuff usually stutters in Totem for me.
I've now tried both MPlayer (but not yet SMPlayer) and VLC to watch DVDs.
VLC doesn't work very well for me because when I pause it continues playing audio for a few seconds, and when I unpause it's out of sync for a while. Also, VLC doesn't have very good keyboard or media-key playback controls by default.
MPlayer, I'm happy to report, does much better for me than Totem. Although DVD nav by keyboard is terrible, mouse works fine. Keyboard playback controls work, but best of all MPlayer doesn't skip after hitting the end of the buffer after I pause. Instead it pauses for a second and resumes from the same spot.
I am a member!
Thanks for the observations re: totem and video playback; I'm trying to play video dvds on Trisquel 6.0, with an Asus netbook and external usb optical drive. When using vlc, I get very chopped audio. With mplayer, I get audio with a strange "buzzy" artifact. I cannot get past the menus with the keyboard, using either player. I installed libdvdcss as instructed at https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/enable-dvd-playback also installed gstreamer-plugins-good, bad and ugly. If I wanted to just rip the audio and forget the video, what would you suggest I use?