DVD on batteries uses 100% CPU and 1GB RAM?!

Ok, so the other night I was watching Fellowship of the Ring on my N5010 because the kids were sitting on chairs in the living room since they couldn't stay in their beds. I was running on batteries and noticed that the playback was kind of choppy. Battery was still mostly full. As you can see from my sig., I couldn't understand why a simple dvd movie ought to be choppy on my machine. So, I bring up task manager and find that the processor is running between 80-100% and that Intervideo WinDVD is eating up 1.2 GB of virtual memory. How weird was that?? Out of curiousity, I plug it into the wall and the processor usage drops to around 20-30% and memory usage drops to a few hundred MB. Movie is now smooth again, rather than stuttering every 5-10 sec. Ok. I pull the power cord and go back to battery again. cpu and RAM usage shoot back up to where they were before and stuttering is back. Anybody know what's going on or how to fix it?

 

that's weird! I'll try it on mine later today and let you know if I get something simillar.
By the way, what version of WinDVD are you using? I guess it's what shipped with your machine, right?

 

It's version 5.0, the one that shipped with the machine, as you correctly surmised.

 

I should have remembered that mine runs fine on batteries since I was watching a movie on it at the airport a couple of weeks ago as I was waiting for my connecting flight. Damn my rotten brains

Anyway I tested it under both conditions.

On battery: WinDVD keeps on eating up memory (bit by bit) until it hits 630MB and stops at that amount (I am only left with 70MB of physical memory at this point and PF usage goes up to 860MB, usually it’s around 250MB). And CPU usage is at ~ 30% all the time (mind you I have hyper threading and for some reason CPU usage is always reported lower than you would expect). I guessed that this extra RAM usage is caused by reading ahead, because once it hit the max RAM usage the DVD light stopped blinking. And even when I jumped a couple of chapters forward the DVD drive still wouldn’t read, but if I jumped half the movie the DVD drive would start reading again. BTW I think this is a cool feature, because it should reduce battery consumption.

On AC: CPU usage was lower, ~ 15%. And RAM usage was limited to less than 30MB. And the DVD drive kept on reading all the time.

So my guess is, according to how much RAM you have WinDVD decides how much it’s gonna read ahead, since you have double my RAM you have double the reading ahead. But what I find weird is why it gets choppy for you. Are you running low on resources (RAM remaining falling below 60MB)?

It might be worth a shot to try and reinstall WinDVD.

By the way I couldn’t understand the difference in CPU usage between battery and AC. It doesn’t make sense to me! The playback is still the same, but instead of getting data from DVD it comes from memory (physical/virtual)

I hope that I might have helped in some way!

By the way, I also have version 5 of WinDVD. The one that shipped with it.

 

My processor is set up for hyper threading as well. I wondered if it was trying to read ahead. Like you said, I still can't see any reason for choppy playback. There was still a ton of physical ram left, even though a lot of swap file was getting used. /rant/ I really hate window for that! I have 2GB of ram and dumb os insists on using swap file!! Debian doesn't do that. /rant/

Oh, and I had tried reinstalling windvd. Didn't change anything. I might ask P1, but I expect I'll have to live with it.

 

let me know if you ask P1 and they have a clue why this might be happening ... I am just curious!

 

Perhaps on battery the processor drops to the lower speed-step? Check your power settings, and also ati power-play that could be turning off some components in the video card. Just a guess.

 

I don't think I have a speed step capable cpu and I don't know about that ATI program you mentioned. Don't recall seeing it on my machine.

Edit: I can't find that ATI program you mentioned. I don't think I have it. Thanks for the suggestions every one. Any other ideas?

 

I emailed P1 and the end result seems to be some kind of problem with windvd and my laptop. PowerDVD runs much better. I think the problem is related to windvd trying to manage cpu speed and ram usage to save battery on a machine that doesn't have a variable speed cpu.

I would like to add that P1 was very courteous and swift to respond, even over a year after I bought from them.