Notices

It's bothering me if I try to watch a movie with my N900 and the video playback isn't smooth. It has all the time a small lagginess... I've tried to overclock the device, but it has no improvement on playback. I've tried the provided media player and SiB, no difference. Does anyone have a solution?

Have you tried more than one file?

A good start is to launch it through mplayer in the terminal with
mplayer [filename]

and see if you have any weird errors..

The default player does that sometimes. So I don't use it for movies and such. Try mplayer, thats what I use.

There can be many reasons... one of them can be..
your movies are in your SD card... and your SD card is a class 2... and mayb pretty much full.

If this applies to you (used to apply to me), move your movies to your phones memory... It will be alright after that.
worth a try...

You could try mplayer and kmplayer. kmplayer is gui for mplayer so you need both.

If I try to play a movie from terminal by using mplayer, this is what I get:

/home/user/MyDocs/.videos/Footrot Flats (1987) # mplayer Footrot_Flats.avi
MPlayer SVN-r30099-4.2.1 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team


MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: unknown
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.
/home/user/MyDocs/.videos/Footrot Flats (1987) #

The default players lagginess seems to differ. If I restart the player the lagginess may be worse or gone. It's weird.

All my videos are in the device's own memory.

The kmplayer seems to work fine after a quick test, so I'll try to use that in the future. Thanks for all of your help! =)

are you on pr1.2?
are your movies on a sd card?
how many space you have in rootfs?
which tasks are running?
did you tried top in xterm to see whats wrong?
did you a correct overclock?
sry for the many question but it can have 100 reasons.
normally it should run good in default mplayer(for me it does even with 2gb video files)
regards

are you on pr1.2?
-Yes

are your movies on a sd card?
-No, they're in device's own memory

how many space you have in rootfs?
-82.4MB free

which tasks are running?
-Just the player, I end everything else for the time of the movie. I mean visible software. I don't know about any tasks than run within the system.

did you tried top in xterm to see whats wrong?
-I tried now. The default player goes automatically into paused state when I change back to xterm. I don't see anything weird in top. It could be that I don't interpret it right. I'm a linux noob. =/

did you a correct overclock?
-I installed the "Enhanced Linux kernel for power users" and used the QCPUFreq -app to OC the cpu. The cpu freq resets to 600MHz everytime the N900 is being restarted and needs to be raised again from QCPUFreq, this doesn't bother me though. I've been using 900MHz and 850MHz.

sry for the many question but it can have 100 reasons.
normally it should run good in default mplayer(for me it does even with 2gb video files)
regards
-I understand. Thanks for your help, mate! =)

i wish i had help you
hmm very complicated.
can you start top make a screenshot and upload it here?

Sure, here's the screenshot as an attachment.

I think the playback has been better now. I don't know why thought. At least KMplayer has been working well. =)