I have been following several of the threads on this list (and the commit list) that have talked about "stuttering" during playback. I don't believe that these issues are describing what I am seeing on my system. My symptoms seem to have started happening about two months ago but I cannot pinpoint the time to some specific change in either my FE/BE combination or the version of mythTV. I keep both my OS (Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit) and mythTV (24-fixes currently v0.24-227-gccd73be) up to date. My version of NVIDIA driver is 260.19.21. My system is based on an Intel Q6600 quad core 2.4GHz cpu. The video being watched is primarily either 720p or 1080i material. I don't believe I have ever seen the problem on 480 material, but that data set may be too small to matter.<div>
<br></div><div>The specific problem I see during playback is a random, short pause with either missing frames or missing audio; hard to tell which. The pause is very short (less than 2 seconds) but long enough to miss 1-3 words of the dialog. The video is not damaged since I can back up and replay the same segment without any interruption. These pauses are random and occur anywhere from none in an hour-long show to four or five times in that period. It is not related to the scheduler starting/stopping other recordings as I check my watch every time one occurs. I do see a slight stutter, occasionally, when I know there are other recordings stopping/starting and that is a different and less annoying symptom. I also limit the number of simultaneous jobs to two and I hold off commflagging until after the recordings have finished. There appears to be nothing of interest in the frontend log. I occasionally see "ALSA, Error: WriteAudio: buffer underrun" messages, but these do not seem to correlate to the pauses.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I am looking for any ideas on how to proceed to troubleshoot this problem. The WAF is not plummeting, but I do get the occasional, exasperated question "Why does it do that?" which, unfortunately, I cannot answer but desperately want to be able to.</div>
<div><br></div><div>-- Ken E.</div>