Online Video Viewing Problem on Thinkpad 390E

andydf · 10-13-2008, 08:03 PM

I have a IBM Thinkpad 390E. I have installed Damn Small Linux and now I running Puppy Linux. On both Operating Systems I have had the same problem watching online video. While watching the video the video has already loaded but still constantly skipping. Almost as if it is in slow motion. The audio is good but it also skips but less often than the video.

I have researched my Thinkpad and found I have a Neomagic NM2200 video card if that helps at all.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

htnakirs · 10-14-2008, 02:03 AM

Did you check if the CPU cycles are high when the skipping occurs? You did not mention your system specs, but FLV videos tend to be cpu intensive. Are you facing problems when playing avi files?

salasi · 10-14-2008, 02:54 AM

A 390E is quite an old, and therefore by modern standards, low spec laptop. You may just find that you are expecting too much of it.

What is the processor and how much ram do you have?

andydf · 10-14-2008, 05:02 PM

The base specs for my laptop is PII/333mhz, 14.1" TFT, 64 MB RAM, and a 6.4 GB disk. I believe the person I got the laptop from had updated the ram to 128mb.

I know the 390E is old but the audio is working perfect on the online videos and the video itself is really only in a little slow motion. It's almost like if I tweaked something to make it just a little faster it would work perfectly.

I hope this helps!

-Andy

salasi · 10-15-2008, 04:13 AM

Quote:

The base specs for my laptop is PII/333mhz, 14.1" TFT, 64 MB RAM, and a 6.4 GB disk. I believe the person I got the laptop from had updated the ram to 128mb.

That upgrade from 64 -> 128 is probably fairly critical here; if it has to swap (or do other work with the hard disk) playback will stutter. You might want to look at the memory usage to see what is going on (vmstat/ksysguard).

Its still a low spec processor (and getting little, if any, assistance from the graphics chip) so it isn't entirely surprising; video does take quite a lot more work from the processor than audio, so it is unsurprising that the problem would be more severe with video;
consider

shutting off unnecessary services, particularly anything that uses interrupts
changing scheduler (that's a bit techie, but may help....or may not)
changing swappiness
adding ram/closing down programs, if it is still swapping