[mythtv-users] Sound Card Selection: Was "Choppy video"

[Josh White]

On Tuesday, May 26, 2009, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:

> > On 05/26/2009 10:51 AM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
>> >
>> > On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Prebuffering_pause
>> >
>>
>>
I've been having a problem with my system where my video would 'pause' for a
frame or two, every 50 seconds or so (I've timed it with a stop watch)
regardless of whether it's sd or hd content.  I went through the steps
listed, and I determined that it appears to be my sound card.  I've tried
using the internal card on my motherboard, and no luck.  I had an old
SoundBlaster Live! value card lying around, so I put that in, and it seemed
to work; I never noiced audio problems that I could hear.  After running
mythfrontend from a command line, it became apparent that I did have an
audio issue:

2009-05-27 21:45:29.212 Video timing method: SGI OpenGL
2009-05-27 21:45:41.412 NVP: prebuffering pause
2009-05-27 21:45:41.463 WriteAudio: buffer underrun
2009-05-27 21:45:43.377 NVP: Prebuffer wait timed out 10 times.
2009-05-27 21:45:48.028 NVP: prebuffering pause
2009-05-27 21:49:21.859 NVP: prebuffering pause

I turned off 5.1 output and the prebuffering and buffer underrun errors go
away.  As I have a 5.1 surround system attached to this machine (and it's
the only one of my frontends that does) it's rather important to me that I
get this working without adversely affecting the video ouput (it's also my
only frontend connected to an HDTV).  What descrete sound cards do people
like out there?  My onboard sound doesn't seem to work, so I need something
to install.  I have 3 different flavors of sound blaster (coincidence; they
all came with various machines) so I guess i should look for something else,
as I would imagine they all use a similar driver (I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 on
this particular machine, but I saw similar problems with 8.10).  is there a
card out there that works with spdif output, and 'just works' out of the box
(no compiling drivers, etc)?

Thanks for any advice,

 Josh
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