[mythtv-users] Fast CPU, DMA enabled on HD, Xv enabled, still getting pauses in Live TV

[Aran Cox]

I have similar fairly beefy specs and always found that LiveTV would
stutter until I paused it for a few seconds and then it would work.  

I would try:
1) not compressing the audio (for livetv, there isn't much point, unless
you have a tiny hard drive)
2) check for IRQ conflicts (you can look at lspci -v)  try monkeying
with which slot the cards are installed in, try disabling other IRQ
using devices which might be built in, like serial or parallel ports,
unused on-board audio, ethernet, etc.)
3) you might try lowering the resolution of capture, if it goes away at
some lower resolution you might assume that something is too slow to
keep up with the higher resolution capture, which with this hardware
would mean some driver or another isn't configured or not configured
correctly, if it never goes away I would say you have a conflict or bad
hardware or something

This is just off the top of my head... 

Good luck...

On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 01:37, Joe V wrote:
> This is completely strange, I don't understand it.
> 
> I upgraded to an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (real speed,
> 2GHz), with an ECS KS57A Pro motherboard today.  The
> motherboard isn't the greatest, but for $89.99 for the
> combo, you can't really beat that.
> 
> Anyway, I have my profile for Live TV setup for
> 480x480, RTJPEG, MP3 Audio compression, level 4
> (middle of the pack or so).  When I run "top", I see
> that mythbackend ranges from 20-43% (CPU), and that
> mythfrontend ranges from 3-15%.  I have DMA enabled on
> my hard drive (hdparm shows this), XVideo is enabled
> on the second head of the Matrox G400 I'm using.  The
> card being used is a Leadtek Winfast TV XP 2000 Deluxe
> (bttv), and I'm using the 2.4.21 kernel, unpatched
> from kernel.org.
> 
> Despite this, I still get a stutter in the video/audio
> every now and then (if you average it out, probably
> once every ten minutes).  The output of "top" doesn't
> seem to spike any, so I don't think that it's the CPU
> not being powerful enough (it should be).
> 
> I've tried a bunch of things...  Swapping RAM
> (currently I'm using PC133, but I took the DDR400 from
> my desktop out and tried it), I've tried not enabling
> the second head on the Matrox (using a monitor), using
> ALSA and OSS, using KDE and Blackbox, heck, almost
> everything I could think of except changing the video
> card (maybe that's it?).  I've also turned off
> unnecessary services in Red Hat 9 (turned off
> sendmail, cups, etc.).
> 
> Does anybody have any further suggestions?  At this
> point, I'm almost suspecting a hardware problem of
> some sort.
> 
> -- Joe
> 
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