Hi all,

Running Ubuntu(PPC obviously) on Imac DV 400Mhz graphite.

Ok so i understand that it's not the quickest of machines but has anyone
with a similar setup got DVD videos to play smoothly in fullscreen?

Is there a way to quit the gui to purely console and play the dvd? Would
this lower the system overheads enough to make a difference anyway?

Ideas?


Thanks

number6 wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Running Ubuntu(PPC obviously) on Imac DV 400Mhz graphite.
>
> Ok so i understand that it's not the quickest of machines but has anyone
> with a similar setup got DVD videos to play smoothly in fullscreen?

Double the speed of the PPC and you end up with the equivalent speed of
an Intel or AMD chip. The machine is roughly as fast as an 800MHz PC.

I have a 350MHz iMac running Xubuntu. As long as it's connected to the
net I can run VLC to watch some AVIs. Some of the really high bitrate
anime which is starting to appear gets choppy in places. If it's not
connected to the net things get unstable (quite the reverse of Windows).

> Is there a way to quit the gui to purely console and play the dvd? Would
> this lower the system overheads enough to make a difference anyway?

Leaving aside the question of if the Mac has a text mode or not... You
can probably try a couple of things. Try the <Ctrl><O-Apple><Backspace>
sequence (the <O-Apple> is equivalent to the <Alt> key). Try the
<Ctrl><F-key> to see if you can switch to a different console. On the
PC, sometimes you can get to a text screen that way.

Now for your last question... I haven't tried it on a Mac. With PCs the
difference is very noticeable. On a 166MHz K6 I was able to go from
playing what is now considered low bitrate AVIs to medium bitrate AVIs.
The GUI consumes a lot of resources. The choice of GUI is also a factor.
Both KDE (especially KDE 4 at the moment) and Gnome are very wasteful.
Although you can choose an efficient GUI there is no way you are going
to get anywhere near the speed of text mode.

> Ideas?

Only a few.

> Thanks
>
>

Later
Mike

On 2008-07-20, The Wizard of Oz <Wizard@EmeraldCity.gov> wrote:
>
> Now for your last question... I haven't tried it on a Mac. With PCs the
> difference is very noticeable. On a 166MHz K6 I was able to go from
> playing what is now considered low bitrate AVIs to medium bitrate AVIs.
> The GUI consumes a lot of resources. The choice of GUI is also a factor.
> Both KDE (especially KDE 4 at the moment) and Gnome are very wasteful.
> Although you can choose an efficient GUI there is no way you are going
> to get anywhere near the speed of text mode.

Not the speed of text mode, but xde is pretty slim. I have it running
on a VM, and with nothing else loaded the system is using 110M of RAM.
A system with 256M would be fine...


--
Joe - Linux User #449481/Ubuntu User #19733
joe at hits - buffalo dot com
"Hate is baggage, life is too short to go around pissed off all the
time..." - Danny, American History X

On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:45:13 +0100
"number6" <pop07kfk@shef.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Running Ubuntu(PPC obviously) on Imac DV 400Mhz graphite.
>
> Ok so i understand that it's not the quickest of machines but has anyone
> with a similar setup got DVD videos to play smoothly in fullscreen?
>
> Is there a way to quit the gui to purely console and play the dvd? Would
> this lower the system overheads enough to make a difference anyway?

There is no way of efficiently playing video from a text console that I
know of. There are graphics drivers for the console (svgalib), but
in general they don't use most of the graphics card's features
(blitting, etc) which creates MORE CPU load, not less. X11's drivers
are better in this regard.

What player software are you using? If you're using gmplayer: it
apparently sets its nice value to 10 on startup, which makes video
playback choppy. I don't know why they do this, I consider it a bug.
You can try if "sudo renice 0 `pidof gmplayer`" makes the video
more fluid. It does here.

Or try to configure your player to use another method of output.
Gmplayer supports GL, Xv, ... and some might be faster than others.

Configuring your driver correctly can also increase speed. E.g. there
are 2 drivers for Nvidia cards: the free "nv" driver and the
vendor-supplied "nvidia" driver. Only the "nvidia" one supports 3D,
while I think "nv" might be slightly faster for 2D stuff (I haven't
compared them for a while though).

There are other things you can do to configure X11 better. This is how
part of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf looks like.

Section "Module"
....
Load "ddc"
Load "vbe"
Load "xaa"
Load "drm"
....
EndSection

These modules all have to do with acceleration (though I'm not quite
sure about "ddc" and "vbe"), and should be loaded.

HTH :)


--
Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist moeglich