[mythtv-users] Pre-buffering pauses on Toshiba 4300 laptop

[Shawn Flynn]

From: "Chris Rouch" <chris.rouch at gmail.com>
>My compaq M700 (P3-700MHZ, 256MB) shows the same symptoms.
>Additionally if I use mplayer with '-zoom -fullscreen' sound and
>vision quickly go out of sync, and it complains that my system is too
>slow. My guess is that laptops as slow as mine (and yours) really are
>too slow for this kind of task.

I'd agree with you there if it weren't for the fact that my Dell laptop 
(P3-600, 256M, S3 Savage/IX) which is very similar to the Toshiba seems to 
be able to play these clips perfectly fine.

I did some playing around, dropped the X colour depth to 15 bit, and now 
have ~15% idle time on my cpu when playing myth recordings. Unfortunately 
I'm still getting pre-buffering pauses. Looking at the "-v playback" logs 
from mythfrontend I see that the audio begins to lag by a few frames then 
the pre-buffering pause will hit. I wonder if there may be a problem with 
audio (yamaha chip) or the machine is RAM starved (192MB). Time to dig 
through the ALSA archives and hunt for some more RAM for the laptop 
(although something tells me 192MB was the maximum RAM this machine could 
take).

Still looking for ideas,
Shawn Flynn