[mythtv-users] NVP: prebuffering pause

[Darrin]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Darrin Smith <signal7 at aperature.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Troubleshooting:Prebuffering_pause
>>
>> http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1
>>
>>
>  If developers gave an error message that was less cryptic, I'm sure you
> would not be answering this question so often.  Hmmm....  maybe that's the
> real bug!
>
> ;-)
>
>
Ok -  I read through the page you linked to and investigated every possible
setting, driver, and act of god that might cause the problem to go away.  No
luck.

The cpu hovers at 44% load during playback with no deinterlace filters
applied and XvMotionCompensation turned on.  I've verified the configuration
using some source code that was posted from the XvMC wiki page to determine
that the configuration of X is correct.  Playback is improved over what I
started with, but I still get stuttering audio playback and the message in
the log that started this thread.

And - before you jump on me about audio, I've been over that with a fine
toothed comb as well.  There is only one audio device in the system and it's
not even that complicated.  It's just a basic motherboard stereo output that
works fine in any other program on the sytem (intel 8x0 chipset, according
to lsmod).

Finally, I also checked for the scheduler issue that was reported a while
back and I'm not using the group scheduler at all.  Doing a renice on the
front end process doesn't change the behavior at all, either.

VLC can play back the recorded segments without dropping audio at all, but
the lack of de-interlacing the video combined with a rather poor downgrade
in size to 1024x768 makes the resulting video look pretty poor.  I can
however copy the file to another system and it plays without issue.

I'm left with questions.  How does one go about debugging this issue in a
more definitive manner than just whacking aimlessly at the video settings
like the wiki is suggesting?  It would seem there is a real need for better
debugging output or more informative messages to help the end user diagnose
what's going on.  Is there a way to get better, more informative output from
the program?

What other suggestions might you have for me to try and diagnose the
problem?  Any ideas would be welcome.
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