Performance for DVD and other video files

At first, have a look at this wiki article Building a custom kernel about customzing the kernel, there is an option for kernel preemption. It is quiet useful in terms of performance while looking DVDs.

Further you have to set in FreeBSD 5 at start an option to activate DMA for disc drives. Without this option, it's rather impossible looking DVDs without stuttering. It is deactivated in FreeBSD 5 by default because at this time, there were many drives which were not compatible with this mode. DMA is not only useful while looking DVDs or videos, but while transfering huge files from CD/DVD to the harddrive too. In fact you have less impact on cpu performance.

Become root,

#su

#sysctl hw.ata

tells you the current condition.

You can enable it within /boot/loader.conf

add this line

hw.ata.atapi_dma=1

save the changes and reboot with

shutdown -r now