Finding a DVD Player and DMA question on an old notebook

[coreplayer2]

I was so sure this would be an easy task, in fact finding an ideal DVD / media player was quite difficult which is strange considering that back in the day this old notebook ran WinXP and played dvd's beautifully on Media Player Classic.   seems like there was always an issue, always a bug, always high on resources sending the cpu usage to 100% and choppy performance as a result, discarding and installing new media players was getting old fast.

I tried
VLC player
mplayer-nodeps
mplayer-svn-gtk2
Xine-ui
dragonplayer

MPlayer is hands down the smoothest high quality playback i've seen so far, however the software lacks a great GUI to go with it.  SMPlayer is ok but has far too many gremlins, has extraordinary video artifacts always at one side of the video or the other most importantly and doesn't work well with DVD menus which makes playing a dvd a difficult task.   For a while I persevered with it because mplayer is low on resources and a smooth player, however in the end I had to ditch it.

VLC is awesome too yet I found is high on resources causing video quality to suffer a little. While VLC would go straight to the title movie selecting the dvd as a source was a pita.

with the exception of mplayer-svn-gtk1 (which I had still to try) none of the others listed would run well if at all.

On a positive note i found Xine-xvesa hands down the best dvd player for this old system.   low on cpu usage, great quality, menus out of the wazoo.  My only criticism is I can't set the player to find and play the title movie on opening, thereby skipping the menus and previews.  At least I haven't been able to find this option yet.

Thanks to xine-xvesa I am saved


To ensure Direct memory access while testing these players I set the dvd DMA to on using "hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc"   it's a pita though to reset after each reboot, so have set this in bootlocal.sh after a few seconds delay to enable DMA at each boot.

in bootlocal.sh

sleep=5
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc


my question:  is this the most effective method to apply DMA at boot up?  or is there some other consideration i'm missing?

The DVD root menu is more stressful than the movie itself, but still am very happy with the result