reason behind poorer multimedia ?

Forum: Multimedia
Topic: reason behind poorer multimedia ?
started by: yib

Posted by yib on Mar. 07 2006,12:21

Hi everyone,

I'm running DSL on a pentium 120 with 16mb ram and 2mb video. (DSL runs fine on this actually). On the same machine I'm also runing windows 95.

Today I played around with playing music and small movie files.
for Mp3s:
In windows, the output was mostly ok, but there were spots where it skips. In DSL, the music was completely garbled.

small 500kb mpeg clip:
In windows, the playback was smooth for the duration (3 seconds). However, in DSL playing with xmms, I saw a total of 2 or 3 frames.

So... I was wonder how come linux has poorer multimedia performance compared to windows when performance otherwise seems equal or superior?

Yib

Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 07 2006,15:16

To be honest, my experiences with multimedia in Linux have mostly been better than in Windows.

It may require some tweaking to get your Linux system to take advantage of your hardware. You may need to enable direct memory access on your drives to improve seek time (boot option "dma", or command "sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/something"). You may need to install a more appropriate video driver, one that enables the use of hardware acceleration. You may need to change the video/audio output drivers on your plaback software. You may need to use entirely different software (try mpg321 for your mp3).

Posted by yib on Mar. 07 2006,21:04

Well thats the thing. For this particular situation dma isn't a factor; and also I think the bottleneck is with the cpu, not the drives. Drivers maybe the problem, but for this kind of old hardware I don't think there are better drivers available for linux anyways.

I probably over generalized earlier as well. In fact multimedia performance have been good for me as well on linux, but generally only on more modern hardware.