Having some old stuff lying around I decided that having a dedicated media PC was easier that moving my main PC.
Old stuff being old stuff I’ve got my eye on BeOS to power it. Now I’ve got:
noname HTPC case
via mini-itx 800
lite-on DVD drive
radeon AIW 7500 PCI
30 GB hard drive
256 MB SDRAM
BeOS MAX
nicely installed. Now I’ve got a small problem using vlc to play DVD’s, performance is bad, (under win2K I would be checking if DMA mode was disabled, no idea how things are with BeOS).
Am I using the wrong program to play dvd’s or do I still need some super-ninja-speed-improving drivers for the radeon?
Note: in win2k DVD’s run fine on this system, but I really want a dedicated BeOS system.
Check if your IDE devices (DVD reader) are using DMA. If you got a Lite-On, it can use UltraDMA 2 afaik (burst 33Mbits/s).
I don’t know what you can use to check it. If you have an original copy of BeOS R5, there is idestatus and ideinfo to do just that. Try talking to the nice people at any Beshare server to see if they can help you.
If you conclude that it’s not using DMA, verify your BIOS settings for the IDE controllers. If you system crashes when loading or just stops, probably you got a non-supported set of IDE controllers… So try looking around for drivers. Bebits got updated drivers for Promise and general use IDE controllers. Try looking over there.
Ok, I’m feeling slightly stupid at this moment; after checking DMA (BeOS MAX includes ideinfo &idestatus)& trying out newer versions of videolan I figured that it might be something with vlc that caused my problems. Then I realized that I hadn’t even tried it yet in win2k (I use powerDVD). So I did, and I get the same problem in windows!
So I suspect that the problem is not in BeOS, but with vlc, I’m going to ask around in the vlc forums.