[mythtv-users] Long delays with remote occasionally

[Dan Wilga]

At 4:22 PM -0700 5/21/09, Allen Edwards wrote:
>  > 1. What CPU does your frontend have?
>ADM 5400+

So that's not an issue...

>  > 2. Why is MFE using USleep for the video timing? Have you tried other
>>  methods? (Even RTC is an improvement, but vblank is best.)
>I have no idea...  As far as I know I am using what mythbuntu came set
>up with.  I googled this topic and all I find is that this is set
>automatically or that some other methods can be enabled but it is
>unclear to me if they will work without a lot of manual intervention.
>Where is this documented?  This
>http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Frame_display_timing was not too helpful.

Usleep is very likely to cause problems, IMHO. If you have an nVidia 
card and a fairly recent video driver, I'd strongly suggest using 
OpenGL Vsync. You can find this in Playback Options, IIRC. (Sorry 
about the typo in my original message.)

Failing that, you should try to get RTC working. The info on the wiki 
page is a starting point but, to be honest, it took me a kernel 
recompile to get it to work with my distro (Mandriva); it wasn't 
pretty.

It is helpful to run mythfrontend with the "-v playback" option, to 
get a full log of why it chose the timing method it did.

>  > 3. Does the problem only happen during playback, or in the menus, also?
>I have not noticed it with the menus but my wife is unsure, so perhaps
>we are not sure.

If it's happening at times other than when video is being displayed, 
that would rule out vsync as the culprit. It still wouldn't hurt to 
get OpenGL vsync working, though.

>  > 4. Have you completely disabled the screensaver? If you do "ps auxw | grep
>>  saver" you should get nothing back, except perhaps for the grep itself.
>dad at myth_desktop:~$ ps auxw | grep saver
>dad      22584  0.0  0.1  15328  3400 ?        Ss   07:56   0:00
>gnome-screensaver
>dad      24165  0.0  0.0   3008   772 pts/0    S+   16:05   0:00 grep saver
>
>I got something back and I have not disabled it with the exception as
>far as I can tell it is disabled by myth when a show is running and I
>still have the problem at that time so can't see how that could be it.
>  Maybe I am missing something.

Some users have found that even just having a screensaver running 
(whether it's scheduled to do anything or not) can be enough to cause 
problems. The way you would permanently disable it varies a bit 
depending on your distro, but it's usually found in 
gnome-control-center.
-- 
Dan Wilga                                                        "Ook."