Random freezes during media playback

[irenicus09]

I've been having random periodic freezes during audio / video playback..it lasts for like 0.5-1s each time and happens continuously.

I'm not sure what I can narrow it down to...there are a lot of factors. It could be that my hard drive is failing or due to aggressive power saving mode.

Recently I've installed laptop-mode-tools, before that I had tlp and in my previous Gentoo install the minimal average power consumption was around 3.5 W but with laptop-mode-tools it has gone down to 2.9-3 W.

So I'm wondering how would be a good way to figure out what the real issue is? I'm installing smartmontools according to the wiki and I'll go through and see what it says about the current state of my hard drive but in the mean time if you have any other ideas feel free to let me know.

Thanks.

Edit-1:
So according to smartctl, it looks like my hard disk passed the test when I used the -H flag. So perhaps laptop-mode-tools is the culprit here or some other factor that I'm not aware of. I should also inform you that I'm using Gentoo hardened and have lot of things going on. Initially when I first made the hardened install there was some error with pulseaudio and then I researched a bit and had to disable a flag in the kernel to allow the audio resource to be released.

[audiodef]

The things that come to my mind:

* disable pulseaudio completely
* switch your ACPI mode to full performance

See if either of those makes a difference, or both together.

* make sure all required codecs are installed for whatever formats you use.
* for video, try changing your video driver, such as xorg-x11 vs. nvidia, using both eselect opengl and the prefs of your software. For example, VLC has video driver options.
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