[mythtv-users] Screen blanking issue with NVidia 455 drivers

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Thu Sep 24 03:11:36 UTC 2020


On Wed, 23 Sep 2020 13:26:46 -0500, you wrote:

>Not sure if this is the best place for this, but I am having an issue with
>MythTV 0.31 and the latest NVidia drivers. My system is ArchLinux and the
>latest NVidia drivers are 455.23.04.
>
>What I'm experiencing is that when I pause anything (live tv or videos) for
>a long enough time, the output to the TV goes to sleep to the point that
>the only way I can get it back is to use CTRL+ALT+F2 to switch to a virtual
>tty, then CTRL+ALT+F1 to get back to the X display. This also is the case
>if I turn my TV off and then immediately back on.
>
>I haven't touched my Xorg config in about 6 months, and things were working
>fine until recently. I tried rolling back my NVidia drivers to version
>450.66 (left Xorg config alone), rebooted and tested again and it works
>fine, the problem goes away.
>
>Again, not sure if this mailing list is the appropriate place to raise
>this, but I thought it might help anyone that happened to have the same
>issue. For now I'll stick with the slightly older drivers and maybe check
>the NVidia forums to see if it's a known issue.
>
>Thanks,
>Erik

Did you try just using the shift key on the keyboard, or using the IR
remote blindly to cause a screen change?  If what you are seeing is
DPMS blanking, either of those would cause the screen to display
again.  Using Ctrl-Alt-F2 also works, but is more than is needed.  I
have off and on again problems with recent Nvidia drivers and DPMS.
Even when I have:

Option "DPMS" "false"

in the Monitor section of my /etc/xorf/conf file, the drivers
sometimes disobey this and enable DPMS anyway.  When this happens, I
have to change the DPMS option to "true" and tell DPMS that all of its
timeouts that cause it to blank the screen are disabled:

Section "ServerFlags"
  Option "BlankTime"    "0"
  Option "StandbyTime"  "0"
  Option "SuspendTime"  "0"
  Option "OffTime"      "0"
EndSection

That normally fixes this problem.

I have had this same problem in the past with much older Nvidia
drivers, so I have always suspected that it is triggered by some of
the other configuration I am putting in my xorg.conf file.  Just last
night I made a change to my xorg.conf file and had the problem come
back again using the 450.66 drivers.  So today I am going to have to
turn on the workaround again and reboot, when I have a gap in the
recordings.


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