Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> Paul Hartman writes:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>
>> wrote:
>
>> > Then my hardware broke, and I got new one, except for the system hard
>> > drive and the PSU. It's an AMD FX-4100 quad-core with 3.6 GHz, 16 G of
>> > RAM. Running gentoo-sources-3.2.1 as kernel. But it seems playing
>> > movies got even worse!
>>
>> You don't mention anything about video card or video driver setup.
>> That's the first thing I would suspect.
>>
>> What video card? What drivers? Are you using hardware accelerated
>> movie playback?
>
> Sorry. Radeon HD 4250 onboard graphics, using the open source radeon
> driver. Hardware acceleration is working fine. As I wrote, it doesn't
> matter which quality the videos are. There is not much CPU being used at
> all, around 5% to 20%, so this is not the bottleneck.
>
>        Wonko
>

I wonder if you copy the movie to /dev/shm first (so disk I/O is not
an issue) does it still have problems? At least this can potentially
eliminate disk I/O as the cause if something else weird is going on.
:)

For the problem of massive amounts of RAM consumed, that's strange.
Are you compiling debug symbols? That can make the RAM usage (in
linking especially) explode...