[mythtv-users] SBLive and RH9 with default drivers?

[Craig Longman]

Jeff C wrote:

> At 11:39 AM 5/21/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> i have an athlon 1GHz, 256MB RAM, emu10k w/alsa.  also a GeForce2 
>> (with the latest nvidia driver).  live tv (and everything else) works 
>> great. every now and then there are strange pauses in livetv, but i 
>> with kde running there is a _ton_ of wasted memory, so i think thats 
>> my only problem right now, drop kde and/or add more memory.
>>
>> do you perhaps not have xv capabilities setup?  if you run xvinfo in 
>> a terminal, what do you see?  and what is the cpu utilization like 
>> when you're watching live?  i see about 10% usage.
>
> I have just completed the ALSA 9 driver install.  I just checked Myth 
> and it still had the jerkiness problem with live TV :(.  I am going to 
> reboot just to make sure I don't have two sound drivers etc loaded.  
> In the mean time, here is the output from xvinfo.  Anything you can 
> suggest to tune things up would be greatly appreciated - especially 
> since we have very similar settings.  I am also running the latest 
> NVIDIA driver.
>
> [root at experiencetv utils]# xvinfo
> X-Video Extension version 2.2
> screen #0
>   Adaptor #0: "NV10 Video Overlay"
>     number of ports: 1 

hmm, that's funny.  my xvinfo doesn't show this.  i have no idea what it 
is, i had just assumed xv was xv, i only show this part:

>   Adaptor #1: "NV05 Video Blitter"
>     number of ports: 32

what did you have for video cards again?  two of them?  someone who 
knows xv better than i, is the 'Video Blitter' one good enough for 
highspeed mythtv images?  i've noticed some lines accross the screen, 
like the image is updated in the middle of a refresh (i know that the 
vsync is supposed to fix this properely) i just wouldn't have thought 
i'd have as many artifacts like that as i am.

anyway, back on to _your_ problem jeff  ;-).  the other thing that 
caused me problems, was that i had dma transfers turned off, and i had 
the debugging output from the ivtv driver.

to enable (or ensure its enabled) search for a program called hdparm, 
get that installed, then type:

     hdparm /dev/hda

you'll see:

/dev/hda:
 multcount    =  0 (off)
 I/O support  =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 nowerr       =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    =  8 (on)
 geometry     = 4982/255/63, sectors = 80043264, start =
 busstate     =  1 (on)

you wanna make sure that using_dma == 1.  if it isn't, this turns it on:

     hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

of course, if you're using other drives for your video storage, enable 
dma on those also.  the last thing that caught me, was the intense 
logging that ivtv does, to turn that off make sure the entry in your 
module config file  to load the ivtv driver looks like this:

  options ivtv debug=0

which turns off most of the logging.

hope that helps!