Re: xmms does not run smoothly
I think the original reply had the right idea. Look at http://kerneltrap.org/node/5186 to quote- Currently the only program that Ted has gotten fully working with the new library is xmms. Comparing the new library to the old, Ted commented, 'when xmms was playing, you could scroll the playlist which would cause the program to read mp3 headers from 100 different files and your music would start skipping. It doesn't do that anymore.' Dan Farrell Applied Innovations [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Antoine Jacoutot Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2006 3:04 AM To: Martin Toft Cc: misc@openbsd.org Subject: Re: xmms does not run smoothly On Sun, 21 May 2006, Martin Toft wrote: Actually, I already use the option read info on load, so I do not experience freezes when scrolling my playlist. However, the freezes appear frequently anyway, e.g. when xmms opens a dialog that reads directory information from the disk, and therefore still annoys me. I suspect my version of the problem is a bit different from what other people report, since the execution of heavy programs, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, also disturbs xmms and causes short lags in the sound. I've been experiencing the exact same problem you describe. I've never looked for a solution though since I always took OpenBSD for a server operating system. I have a Linux box lying around for when I want to listen to music, play videos... Maybe the new kernel threads will make the problem go away, I have no idea. Regards, -- Antoine
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
On Sun, 21 May 2006, Martin Toft wrote: Actually, I already use the option read info on load, so I do not experience freezes when scrolling my playlist. However, the freezes appear frequently anyway, e.g. when xmms opens a dialog that reads directory information from the disk, and therefore still annoys me. I suspect my version of the problem is a bit different from what other people report, since the execution of heavy programs, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, also disturbs xmms and causes short lags in the sound. I've been experiencing the exact same problem you describe. I've never looked for a solution though since I always took OpenBSD for a server operating system. I have a Linux box lying around for when I want to listen to music, play videos... Maybe the new kernel threads will make the problem go away, I have no idea. Regards, -- Antoine
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
Thanks for the replies so far :) Sorry for not replying faster, but here goes: Emmanuel Jarri wrote: The workaround I use is to increase buffer size to its maximum, i.e. 13MB, with 50% to upper pre buffer. It works quite nicely, but I feel it's a dirty workaround... My xmms will not go higher than 4096 kb and 90% pre-buffering, and, unfortunately, those values do not make the temporary freezes go away. If it worked for me I would also think of it as a dirty workaround :) Ted Unangst wrote: the two solutions are to prescroll the entire playlist (slowly, so there are no gaps) or to switch to librthread (which is not done, but worked for xmms before anything else). if you haven't heard of librthread, then i don't think it'd be good to switch, but the problem is being worked on. Actually, I already use the option read info on load, so I do not experience freezes when scrolling my playlist. However, the freezes appear frequently anyway, e.g. when xmms opens a dialog that reads directory information from the disk, and therefore still annoys me. I suspect my version of the problem is a bit different from what other people report, since the execution of heavy programs, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, also disturbs xmms and causes short lags in the sound. I have not heard about librthread and would rather like to try another player than hacking xmms to get smoother sound on my system. Can you tell me more about what is being worked on and by who? Doug Clements wrote: Check this: http://www.geocities.com/phileosophos/tech/pcilatency.html Thanks for the link - I found it educational. It presents PowerStrip as the solution, however, as you might have guessed by now, I am not running Microsoft Windows :) It makes me wonder how to change the PCI priorities in OpenBSD... hmm... I will try to look into that. If somebody knows that this is a wrong path to follow, then please tell me. /Martin
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
On 2006/05/21 01:00, Martin Toft wrote: I have not heard about librthread and would rather like to try another player than hacking xmms to get smoother sound on my system. Can you tell me more about what is being worked on and by who? You can read about rthreads here, http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsd2005/tedu-rthreads.pdf Doug Clements wrote: Check this: http://www.geocities.com/phileosophos/tech/pcilatency.html Thanks for the link - I found it educational. It presents PowerStrip as the solution, however, as you might have guessed by now, I am not running Microsoft Windows :) It makes me wonder how to change the PCI priorities in OpenBSD... hmm... I will try to look into that. If somebody knows that this is a wrong path to follow, then please tell me. Some motherboards (e.g. some VIA-based socket7) have problems (including crackly/stuttering sound), fiddling with PCI priorities is a possible work- around.
xmms does not run smoothly
Hi, xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks, e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. It is not a serious problem, it just annoys me that my OpenBSD installation apparently does not perform as well as my friend's Debian GNU/Linux installation, which does not suffer from the problem. It _is_ a matter of honor :) Any help is appreciated, but my primary objective is to find out whether I am the only person experiencing this problem. I run OpenBSD 3.9-release on an IBM Thinkpad T41 laptop with all file sets except bsd.mp. The relevant, installed packages are: esound-0.2.34p0 libao-0.8.5p2 libid3tag-0.15.1bp0 libmad-0.15.1bp1 xmms-1.2.10p6 I have tried increasing the buffer size and pre-buffer percent in Preferences - Audio I/O Plugins - MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Player 1.2.10 [libmpg123.so} - Configure - Streaming to as high as 4096 kb and 50%. It did not help. However, maybe these values only affect streaming (over networks). /Martin
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
It was/is the case for me too ! :-( The workaround I use is to increase buffer size to its maximum, i.e. 13MB, with 50% to upper pre buffer. It works quite nicely, but I feel it's a dirty workaround... Nevertheless it allows me to play mp3 and ogg on my 700MHz Athlon with 384MB of RAM, even with cumulated/simultaneous : _ high FTP loads (with vsftp in FTP mode, didn't tested with SFTP) _ web browsing through Firefox (10 tabs) _ Gaim 1.5 _ Xchat. _ Bluefish _ 3 xterms But it keeps micro-freezing sometimes, and memory load is around 360MB (of 384). :-| mylife I didn't complain as I was warned OBSD is quite server oriented, It was quite a challenge to use it for everyday desktops tasks. The main problem I have is the VERY SLOW PAGE SCROLLING in web pages... And I don't know how to fix it, if it's possible. /mylife On 5/18/06, Martin Toft [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks, e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. It is not a serious problem, it just annoys me that my OpenBSD installation apparently does not perform as well as my friend's Debian GNU/Linux installation, which does not suffer from the problem. It _is_ a matter of honor :) Any help is appreciated, but my primary objective is to find out whether I am the only person experiencing this problem. I run OpenBSD 3.9-release on an IBM Thinkpad T41 laptop with all file sets except bsd.mp. The relevant, installed packages are: esound-0.2.34p0 libao-0.8.5p2 libid3tag-0.15.1bp0 libmad-0.15.1bp1 xmms-1.2.10p6 I have tried increasing the buffer size and pre-buffer percent in Preferences - Audio I/O Plugins - MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Player 1.2.10 [libmpg123.so} - Configure - Streaming to as high as 4096 kb and 50%. It did not help. However, maybe these values only affect streaming (over networks). /Martin
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
On 5/18/06, Martin Toft [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks, e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. It is not a serious problem, it just annoys me that my OpenBSD installation apparently does not perform as well as my friend's Debian GNU/Linux installation, which does not suffer from the problem. It _is_ a matter of honor :) Any help is appreciated, but my primary objective is to find out whether I am the only person experiencing this problem. everyone experiences it. if you'd been at eurobsdcon, you could have watched me demo it in front of a crowd. :) the two solutions are to prescroll the entire playlist (slowly, so there are no gaps) or to switch to librthread (which is not done, but worked for xmms before anything else). if you haven't heard of librthread, then i don't think it'd be good to switch, but the problem is being worked on.
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
Check this: http://www.geocities.com/phileosophos/tech/pcilatency.html --Doug On 5/18/06, Emmanuel Jarri [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It was/is the case for me too ! :-( The workaround I use is to increase buffer size to its maximum, i.e. 13MB, with 50% to upper pre buffer. It works quite nicely, but I feel it's a dirty workaround... Nevertheless it allows me to play mp3 and ogg on my 700MHz Athlon with 384MB of RAM, even with cumulated/simultaneous : _ high FTP loads (with vsftp in FTP mode, didn't tested with SFTP) _ web browsing through Firefox (10 tabs) _ Gaim 1.5 _ Xchat. _ Bluefish _ 3 xterms But it keeps micro-freezing sometimes, and memory load is around 360MB (of 384). :-| mylife I didn't complain as I was warned OBSD is quite server oriented, It was quite a challenge to use it for everyday desktops tasks. The main problem I have is the VERY SLOW PAGE SCROLLING in web pages... And I don't know how to fix it, if it's possible. /mylife On 5/18/06, Martin Toft [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks, e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. It is not a serious problem, it just annoys me that my OpenBSD installation apparently does not perform as well as my friend's Debian GNU/Linux installation, which does not suffer from the problem. It _is_ a matter of honor :) Any help is appreciated, but my primary objective is to find out whether I am the only person experiencing this problem. I run OpenBSD 3.9-release on an IBM Thinkpad T41 laptop with all file sets except bsd.mp. The relevant, installed packages are: esound-0.2.34p0 libao-0.8.5p2 libid3tag-0.15.1bp0 libmad-0.15.1bp1 xmms-1.2.10p6 I have tried increasing the buffer size and pre-buffer percent in Preferences - Audio I/O Plugins - MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Player 1.2.10 [libmpg123.so} - Configure - Streaming to as high as 4096 kb and 50%. It did not help. However, maybe these values only affect streaming (over networks). /Martin
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
My mistake. He appeared to be complaining about stuttering during other activities, only including reading id-3 tags as an example. --Doug On 5/18/06, Ted Unangst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/18/06, Doug Clements [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Check this: http://www.geocities.com/phileosophos/tech/pcilatency.html totally irrelevant.
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
On 5/18/06, Martin Toft [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks, e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. ... While not a solution to the general problem of stuttering in xmms, the stuttering while scrolling your playlist is easily solved now by saving into the playlist the ID3-tag data. xmms will do this for you if you load a playlist, scroll through it (so that xmms has to load the data for all the entries), and then save the playlist back to disk, overwriting the file you loaded. When you next load that playlist, you'll experience no delays for ID3-tag loading. That's just for .m3u playlist files, of course. Not perfect, but it's an easy to to get rid of an annoying class of blips. (The data is just placed in comments in the .m3u file, so you could probably whip up a script to insert that info without having to work the xmms GUI...) Philip Guenther
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
I have always had the suspection that desktop software like xmms and firefox
run a bit slower on OpenBSD in comparison with other OS's, but never had a
clue why it happened, or if it was only happening on my machine.
I suspect (and may be completely wrong) that it could be something regarding
process switching latency; let me explain: when compiling Linux
kernel, somewhere
it has an option to change kernel latency, with three options {server,
?, low-latency
desktop} - I forgot the middle one.
Is my guess wrong, should I change login.conf, is there any sysctl to
be changed?
Thanks and don't flame me [too much]. =)
Regards,
On 5/18/06, Philip Guenther [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 5/18/06, Martin Toft [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks,
e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. ...
While not a solution to the general problem of stuttering in xmms, the
stuttering while scrolling your playlist is easily solved now by
saving into the playlist the ID3-tag data. xmms will do this for you
if you load a playlist, scroll through it (so that xmms has to load
the data for all the entries), and then save the playlist back to
disk, overwriting the file you loaded. When you next load that
playlist, you'll experience no delays for ID3-tag loading. That's
just for .m3u playlist files, of course.
Not perfect, but it's an easy to to get rid of an annoying class of blips.
(The data is just placed in comments in the .m3u file, so you could
probably whip up a script to insert that info without having to work
the xmms GUI...)
Philip Guenther
--
Felipe Brant Scarel
PATUX/OpenBSD Project Leader (http://www.patux.cic.unb.br)
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
On 5/18/06, Martin Toft [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, xmms on my computer freezes temporarily when doing disk-intensive tasks, e.g. examining the ID3-tags of a long playlist. It is not a serious problem, it just annoys me that my OpenBSD installation apparently does not perform as well as my friend's Debian GNU/Linux installation, which does not suffer from the problem. It _is_ a matter of honor :) Any help is appreciated, but my primary objective is to find out whether I am the only person experiencing this problem. I run OpenBSD 3.9-release on an IBM Thinkpad T41 laptop with all file sets except bsd.mp. The relevant, installed packages are: esound-0.2.34p0 libao-0.8.5p2 libid3tag-0.15.1bp0 libmad-0.15.1bp1 xmms-1.2.10p6 I have tried increasing the buffer size and pre-buffer percent in Preferences - Audio I/O Plugins - MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Player 1.2.10 [libmpg123.so} - Configure - Streaming to as high as 4096 kb and 50%. It did not help. However, maybe these values only affect streaming (over networks). Don't know if it's related, probably not, but on my IBM T20 with 3.8-stable if I start up xmms from a URL in Firefox it freezes at the end of anywhere from the first link I click on to the 4th or 5th one. For example, if I'm previewing songs at emusic.com the first song clip will play through, but then by the 2nd or 3rd clip xmms will be locked up and not responding. I have to kill -9 it to continue. I've been meaning to troubleshoot but have had zero time. xmms works fine on mp3s from my harddrive. Greg
Re: xmms does not run smoothly
On 5/18/06, Felipe Scarel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I have always had the suspection that desktop software like xmms and firefox
run a bit slower on OpenBSD in comparison with other OS's, but never had a
clue why it happened, or if it was only happening on my machine.
I suspect (and may be completely wrong) that it could be something regarding
process switching latency; let me explain: when compiling Linux
kernel, somewhere
it has an option to change kernel latency, with three options {server,
?, low-latency
desktop} - I forgot the middle one.
Is my guess wrong, should I change login.conf, is there any sysctl to
be changed?
Thanks and don't flame me [too much]. =)
Check the archives regarding Firefox. It was just discussed within
the last week or two.
Greg
