USB audio stutter

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Wednesday 24 March 2010, Ric Moore wrote:
> Running Jaunty, I'm experiencing audio stutter through my USB
> headphones while watching DVD's. For that matter the DVD video
> stutters a touch too. Is there someway to increase buffers to the
> DVD device?? Or, anyone else have a clue towards the stuttering
> problem?
> 
> I'm running 32bit, on an AMD64 with 2 gigs of memory. No
> pulseaudio installed. I don't experience the stutter when using
> the regular sound card through speakers. It happens no matter if
> I use Xine or VLC. Thanks, Ric

In xine right-click on the window and select Setting->Setup.
Make sure experience_level is set to "Master of the known universe" 
(re-open the settings if it wasn't). Go to the "engine" tab. Set 
"buffers.audio_num_buffers" and "buffers.video_num_buffers" to some 
higher values. (I suggest using >1000 for the video buffers and at 
least 500 for the audio ones. I personally use 5k for video and 1k 
for audio.)
These values will require some tweaking, but you should immediately 
notice a huge difference if the problem is in the software. If it is 
hardware-related, this might not help. Be aware that setting these 
values too high will result in a significant delay when switching 
between videos e.g. when the video was split into smaller chunks. 
Also, the audio buffer does not need to be as large as the video 
buffer for obvious reasons.

  --Reinhold