Bad DVD reproduction

Hi Eberhard

What program are you using to play the DVDs?

Tony

It is the same on Video player as well as on Kaffeine or any other player...

Hi Eberhard,
start either in a terminal
gnome-system-monitor

or
System / Administration / System monitor (System / Systemverwaltung / Systemüberwachung)

and afterwards the Videoplayer.
Watch the RAM section and CPU section.
I think it's the combination of small RAM and not very fast CPU.
If the subnotebook runs out of RAM it beginns to swap and then the DVD will interrupt.

If RAM and CPU seems normal you can try out the following:
Copy a VOB file of the VIDEO_TS directory of your DVD (for example VTS_01_1.VOB) which is a bit larger to your harddrive and open it with the Video Player. If this file is played without problems it's your DVD drive.
(this copy process will only be able if the DVD is not copy-protected)

When the DVD runs the processor is at 100%... seems to be overcharged. Is this normal for an 933 MHz PIII and 512 MB Ram? My Mac has 1 GHz and 512 MB too and plays DVDs properly.

You can't really compare Mac and PCs.

The almost same MHz doesn't mean the same. If you compare Intel Processors
Celeron 2,8 GHz and
Core 2 Q9400 with 2.66 GHz
you'll see that the Core 2 is about 11 times faster although it seems slower from the GHz.

Especially PIIIs are quite outdated and DVDs have really lots of data to handle with.
In Addittion to that, some DVDs have a copy protection, which will cause heavy load with absolutely no use for anyone except the producers of the DVDs.

A PIII marks with 156 and a Intel Core 2 Q9400 with 2.66 GHz with 3674 (an AMD Phenom II X4 955 with almost the same 3668) Which is simple 23,55 times faster.
The top CPUs are 39 times faster.

It might be of help to increase the RAM, but I have my doubts, if it would be clever to invest it.

When you want an impressive comparsion between CPUs look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html