[ILUG] P2 400MHz too slow for video?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi all,

	to my great joy I've managed to get my Aureal Vortex 1 sound card
working (which I hadn't tried since failing a year or so ago) and then DVD
playing with mplayer working on a Debian Woody system on a PII 400MHz
128MB RAM.  However, disappointingly mlayer complains that the system is
not fast enough to play this and apparently with the way the sound gets out
of sync this is too right.

	I have played DVD in windows on this machine.  I have a zoran
hardware decoder card.  I have read about people using 350MHz celerons and
it working.  Looking at top when I play dvds I see the cpu usage is about
75-80% mplayer and about 15-20% XFree86 (I have a 8MB STB nvidia using nv
driver).

	I am using gnome/enlightement but these don't appear to be using
cpu to speak of, the res is 1280x1024, but when I full-screen mplayer I'd
have thought this would be irrelevant.

	I have loaded the zoran module.  Do I guess it's being used in
playback?

zoran                  19248   0 (unused)
videodev                5024   2 [zoran]
i2c-old                 4064   1 [zoran]

	If I pass it -ac hwac3 it stops complainging about cpu usage but
unfortuantely my sound card (or the driver for it) doesn't seem to support
AC3 so I get no sound.

	I've been to the livid site and others but can't find much about
optimizing this.  Anyone know the problem here or a good place to go for
answers?

gavin