[mythtv-users] Video quality on 0.28 worse than it was on 0.21

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 15:37:30 +1000, you wrote:

>On 24 August 2018 at 15:31, Mike Holden <mikeholden99+mythtv at gmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>> Yes, you need to disable nouveau so that the nvidia driver can load at
>> boot time.
>>
>>
>> On 24 August 2018 at 15:17, glen <glenb at glenb.us> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 2018-08-23 at 21:54 -0700, Allen Edwards wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't think the nvidia drivers are getting loaded and I can't figure
>>> out how to get them used.  I uninstalled them and installed them using the
>>> Other Drivers section and still I get this:
>>>
>>> *allen at MythNew:~$ lsmod | grep video*
>>> *video                  40960  1 nouveau*
>>> *allen at MythNew:~$ lsmod | grep nvidia*
>>> *allen at MythNew:~$*
>>> allen at MythNew:~$ lsmod | grep NVIDIA
>>> allen at MythNew:~$
>>>
>>> maybe disable nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d . i think if your nvidia was installed correctly you would have a
>>>
>>> conf in that directory that blacklists the nouveau driver. i would also check /lib/modules/ to see if there is even an
>>>
>>> nvidia.ko module there. my guess is that your nvidia package is not installing. try a sudo modprobe nvidia and see what the
>>>
>>> result is.
>>>
>>>
>Oops, that posted before I intended :-(
>
>Apologies for the top-post as well, I hadn't finished writing my reply.
>
>Check out the MythTV Wiki page for Nvidia, which has specific instructions
>for Ubuntu. No idea how accurate they are, as Ubuntu isn't something I do.
>
>From going through this on Fedora, you need to blacklist the nouveau
>module, add a kernel parameter in your boot config (grub/grub2) to
>blacklist the driver, and then load the nvidia driver after boot completes.
>I assume Ubuntu is ultimately the same, but possibly achieved via slightly
>different mechanisms.
>
>https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/NVidiaProprietaryDriver

In Ubuntu, all the blacklisting should be done automatically by the
Other Drivers GUI installer (or "ubuntu-drivers autoinstall", which
does the same thing).  However, it depends on the version of the
Nvidia drivers that you need - autoinstall can select a later version
that does not work (eg 340 for an 8600GT card, which needs 304).  So
it is best to use the GUI and select the version you need.  The
correct version can be found in the documentation of installed Nvidia
drivers, or on the Nvidia site.

If the Nvidia drivers install properly, then a file like this will be
installed:

/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf

With my 340 drivers, it contains this:

# This file was installed by nvidia-340
# Do not edit this file manually

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-current
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96
blacklist nvidia-current-updates
blacklist nvidia-173-updates
blacklist nvidia-96-updates
blacklist nvidia-340-updates
alias nvidia nvidia_340
alias nvidia-uvm nvidia_340-uvm
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off

To find out what drivers are active, do this command:

lshw -C video

which gives this for me:

  *-display
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: GT216 [GeForce GT 220]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci at 0000:01:00.0
       version: a2
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master
cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
       resources: irq:55 memory:fd000000-fdffffff
memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff
ioport:e000(size=128) memory:fe000000-fe07ffff

You can see on the "configuration:" line that it says "driver=nvidia".