[mythtv-users] Debugging mythfrontend video freeze

[Ryan Steffes]

On Nov 28, 2007 11:03 PM, Scott D. Davilla <davilla at 4pi.com> wrote:
> >I can't help with your video freeze issue, but are you sure this isn't a
> >typo?  You say your playing back 720p and 1080i on a 1Ghz Pentium-M with
> >with Nvidia 7300?
> >
> >I'm not sure, but I think the myth-vid bits are now in Svn - I thought
> >there wasn't an improvement in performance with the OpenGL rendering?
> >If there is, I am pleasantly surprised.
>
> Not a typo, it's a 1GHz Pentium-M w/ Nvidia 7300. A 1GHz Pentium-M is
> faster than you would first believe but the Nvidia is what makes
> 1080i HD content possible.
>
> And yes, this is recent trunk with myth-vid merges. I'm doing
> xvmc-blit with one field deinterlace.
>
> There was no improvement that I see, I was able to do this before the
> myth-vid merge and also before all the ffmpeg sync problems a few
> months ago. It's only been recent that the ffmpeg sync problems have
> settled down where I'm back to running smooth again. My only issue is
> the random freeze.


What kernel are you running?

I've had some recent problems with sudden lock ups with a 2.6.17
kernel, and found corresponding messages about IRQs in
/var/log/messages.  My other machine with same svn and same kernel,
but different hardware, has no problem at all.  The fix for me was
adding "irqpoll" to the boot options.

Even if that's not your problem, try checking /var/log/messages and
the various kernel related messages in /var/log/ to see if you can
determine if some error occurs at around the time it locks up, or if
some other process ISN'T throwing errors, but just so happens to start
at about the same time.  For example, when I was using reiserfs, there
was a bug where repeated fast read of very large fils could eventually
overload the file system causing a lock up if done in a very specific
unusual way -- an usual way that happened to match up to chkrootkit
running "find" over NFS from an entirely different machine hitting
every file in the video directory.

Ryan