[mythtv-users] Stuttering FE

[Yan-Fa Li]

On 4/10/06, James Oltman <cnlibmyth at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just rebuilt my FE machine to have FC4 with kernel 2.6.16-1.  I also
> installed the latest MythTV from ATrpms last week.  Now, I am having
> problems with the FE stuttering on myth recordings and on LiveTV.  I will be
> watching a recording or LiveTV and it all of the sudden the video and audio
> will stop, hang for brief second, then continue.  It does this quite often.
> I thought that it was a problem when the BE was recording, but it happens
> even when it's not recording.  I can reboot the FE while the BE is recording
> and the problem goes away.  But not for long.  This does not happen when I
> watch MythVideo.  I am using Xine to play my videos and there is no
> stuttering problem.  This leads me to believe that it is not a problem with
> X, but I am no Linux expert by any stretch of the imagination.  Any help
> would be appreciated.  Thanks!
>
> Jim
>

Interesting.  I had an older FC4 based FE running 0.18 and it was
doing exactly this.  This weekend I upgraded it to the latest updates
from ATRPMS and 0.19 both backend and frontend and the stuttering went
away.  I never did figure out what caused it, but it did upgrade to
the latest Nvidia driver and things got silky smooth again.

FE Machine is a celeron 1.4, with 512MB RAM, 40GB HD and a low-end
GeForce MX video card.  Before the stuttering I was going crazy trying
different things on the backend, including replacing a HD that was
excessively recalibrating, tuning the IRQ latency timers, increasing
the size of the TCP read/write buffers, and playing with the IO
scheduler algorithms.  My guess in the end was a bad nvidia driver on
the frontend since the most recent upgrade went to the newest one
available from livna.  When it's playing back MPEG2 recordings it
averages about 33% CPU on a 720x480 output with digital audio out.

Actually one thing that I did have to do which threw a wrench in the
backend was reconfigure the Tuner to 1 for the new 0.6 driver.  I had
to go into the SQL and delete the old reference to Tuner 0 in the db
as mythtv-setup didn't remove it and recordings were failing.  Also
the AT distributed ivtv-driver was hanging on my backend system for
reasons I never figured out.  I download the distribution from
ivtv-driver.org and everything started working again.

Good Luck,

Yan