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General => Installation issues => Topic started by: colinjones on January 17, 2008, 11:54:09 am

Title: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 17, 2008, 11:54:09 am
Have installed the AMD64 DVD beta3 on an Abit AN-M2HD - 5200+, 2GB RAM, uses the 630a and 7050PV nVidia chipset

1. in 720p and 1080p video is jerky, even the flickr images do not scroll smoothly, plus there is a tear half way down the screen. Yes, its with alpha blending, but I heard that since Beta2, especially in 720p this was smooth now. But even Flickr images??!! Connected using HDMI to DVI, but that shouldn't make any diff. This mobo should have more than enough grunt shouldn't it?

I have gone to the config in the admin page - video card was set to Standard Video Card, and acceleration to xv. I understand that 0710 has all the new nVidia drivers as of Dec07.... anyway, I switched it to GeForce or TNT2, and chose opengl, and rebooted. Same issue. Pretty much guessing on these options.... any suggestions? (Totallymaxed? :) )

2. I chose VDR during the setup (I'm in a DVB area), but Sarah didn't detect my Nova T500. In the same screen as above, the PVR is set to None. Dropping it down, there is no option for Nova T500.... what should I choose? Shouldn't it have detected it automatically?

3. CSS installed and working fine for playing DVD - tried to rip a DVD, and it just comes back straight away as failed, no explanation. Only just tried this, haven't played around, so no biggy yet - main thing is getting the video smooth and stop the flickering (with vertical sync) - BTW, I set the BIOS to 256MB ( the max ) for shared memory...
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: totallymaxed on January 17, 2008, 12:21:22 pm
Have installed the AMD64 DVD beta3 on an Abit AN-M2HD - 5200+, 2GB RAM, uses the 630a and 7050PV nVidia chipset

1. in 720p and 1080p video is jerky, even the flickr images do not scroll smoothly, plus there is a tear half way down the screen. Yes, its with alpha blending, but I heard that since Beta2, especially in 720p this was smooth now. But even Flickr images??!! Connected using HDMI to DVI, but that shouldn't make any diff. This mobo should have more than enough grunt shouldn't it?

I have gone to the config in the admin page - video card was set to Standard Video Card, and acceleration to xv. I understand that 0710 has all the new nVidia drivers as of Dec07.... anyway, I switched it to GeForce or TNT2, and chose opengl, and rebooted. Same issue. Pretty much guessing on these options.... any suggestions? (Totallymaxed? :) )

2. I chose VDR during the setup (I'm in a DVB area), but Sarah didn't detect my Nova T500. In the same screen as above, the PVR is set to None. Dropping it down, there is no option for Nova T500.... what should I choose? Shouldn't it have detected it automatically?

3. CSS installed and working fine for playing DVD - tried to rip a DVD, and it just comes back straight away as failed, no explanation. Only just tried this, haven't played around, so no biggy yet - main thing is getting the video smooth and stop the flickering (with vertical sync) - BTW, I set the BIOS to 256MB ( the max ) for shared memory...

Hi Colin,

Re your questions;

1. I have never see UI2 + Alphablending run smoothly... so I am not surprised. We just don't use it at present as it exacts too much of a price in terms of display smoothness and quality. Use UI2 overlay in the AVwizard and your done ;-)

2. Sarah will not detect your T500... but the card is setup and the firmware is loaded ok. We tested with T500's so I know that is the case. There is no need to change anything in Wizard -> Devices Media Directors for VDR or for the TV card. Don't touch those settings at all... if you chose VDR in the setup wizard then the only thing that you need to do is load a valid channels.conf into the VDR setup page and your in business!

3. If you used 'Add Software' to add libdvdcss and the you saw the installing software messages appear top left and then the 'tick' appear in the Wizard... then ripping should work. This was tested to death here and it works for sure.

Hope the above helps.

Andrew
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 17, 2008, 12:30:04 pm
Thanks Andrew....

On 1 - will try without blending, just really want to be able to use it!! Someone else has this board - might have been tkmedia - and said that after beta2 the video was smooth even with blending... there seems to be 2 distinct effects, one is jerkiness in pans every second or so, the other is quite separate, and that is "flickeriness" which happens much more frequently, and seems to be the frame buffer not syncing with the vsync very well. eg taking longer than 1/50th second to draw. Are both these normal with the blending?

On 2 - I can get into VDR but it says no signal. I haven't got that file you mentioned for my area, on the question I asked before, isn't there someway I can ask it to auto tune, rather than use the file?

On 3 - yes CSS is definitely installed, I did it myself and waited for the tick to come and the confirmation message before carrying on. Rebooted since, and it still says its installed, plus it can play a DVD just fine.... just fails on the rip..... not to worry, I haven't investigated this one much yet...
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Zaerc on January 17, 2008, 03:34:35 pm
On 2 - I can get into VDR but it says no signal. I haven't got that file you mentioned for my area, on the question I asked before, isn't there someway I can ask it to auto tune, rather than use the file?

I think you can create such a file with one of the command line tools tzap, szap or czap.  Which will probably need to be installed with:
Code: [Select]
apt-get install dvb-utils
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: totallymaxed on January 17, 2008, 03:37:15 pm
Thanks Andrew....

On 1 - will try without blending, just really want to be able to use it!! Someone else has this board - might have been tkmedia - and said that after beta2 the video was smooth even with blending... there seems to be 2 distinct effects, one is jerkiness in pans every second or so, the other is quite separate, and that is "flickeriness" which happens much more frequently, and seems to be the frame buffer not syncing with the vsync very well. eg taking longer than 1/50th second to draw. Are both these normal with the blending?

On 2 - I can get into VDR but it says no signal. I haven't got that file you mentioned for my area, on the question I asked before, isn't there someway I can ask it to auto tune, rather than use the file?

On 3 - yes CSS is definitely installed, I did it myself and waited for the tick to come and the confirmation message before carrying on. Rebooted since, and it still says its installed, plus it can play a DVD just fine.... just fails on the rip..... not to worry, I haven't investigated this one much yet...

Re: 1. I think it could well be a timing issue. But tearing and jerkiness are both the symptoms we see here. So UI2 + Overlay is our default until that can be fixed... and in that mode we get great playback performance.

Re: 2. VDR has no internal auto-tune or scan capability. Use the scan DVB util;

Try
scan -o vdr > channels.conf

Re: 3 It may just be that the DVD you are having problems with is one that will not RIP. We have have seen this with for example "Spiderman III". Have you tried any other DVD's?
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: tkmedia on January 17, 2008, 04:15:52 pm
Someone ese has this board - might have been tkmedia - and said that after beta2 the video was smooth even with blending...

Yes that was me.

I have two of these one acting as the core/hybrid and one as a MD The first nvidia driver installed after the B2 seemed the best for tearing but I think had stability issues. I have since updated the driver on the core and am getting less than stellar performance with blending.

I think the MD maybe still using the original driver.
I will review the performance and driver versions and report back.
What is the best way to list the driver version?



Is tearing only an issues on LCD TV's  I don't seem to notice this on LCD Monitors.

Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 17, 2008, 09:17:01 pm
Thanks Andrew and Zaerc. Tk.. Will be interested in your experiences. I am still using the b3 default drivers - struggling to get Envy installed, and not really sure if I should override the default ones given how recently they were added.... Can you tell me what your video card and acceleration settings are in the admin console? Think the monitor vs TV thing might just be that the TVs are much larger and so more noticable. For what its worth I am plugged into my LCD monitor and can see this, haven't even tried my big LCD TV yet.

Andrew - DAMN! I can still see these issues even without blending. No diff..

Still flickering 1) esp exactly half way down the screen there is a single tear that doesn't seem to move. Can see it in both LMCE and KDE. Pans like in Flickr, are distinctly "rough" jerky is overstating it, but certainly I have seen screen savers that are MUCH smoother. Even the fade-ins and outs of pictures cause a noticeable rippling/flickering (how ironic!) effect.

KDE desktop - even dragging windows quickly around the screen cause several dramatic tears in the window and if there is a background in Kaffine (paused movie) its quite clearly redrawing that background as the window moves off. Its very high end video hardware - my gut screams this is nowhere near what it is capable off!

KDE, Kaffine, flickr, xine for hdd based mpg videos, xine for DVDs, and HD video (WMV HD advanced profile) all seem to exhibit pretty much the same behaviour even though they are vastly different loads on the video/GPU!!

Can you suggest what video card and acceleration settings I should be using to ensure I get the most from hardware acc?

BTW deinterlacing is disabled in all these tests, and the LCD screen is connected via HDMI-DVI.

Any help at all would be appreciated - got no experience in this chipset or configuring LMCE's video subsystem to work well - all I know is it shouldn't be like this!
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: tkmedia on January 17, 2008, 11:14:51 pm
One thing I am finding (might be obvious) is that it is a lot easier testing video drivers and such on the MDs. If you break things or just want to verify procedures just rebuild the diskless image and your back to the defaults. (A lot easier than rebuilding the core each time.)
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: tkmedia on January 18, 2008, 02:07:36 am
Drivers I am running on 0710 b2 and status
core
Abit
nvidia-glx-new = 1:169.07+2.6.22-14
nvidia-glx-new-dev = 1:169.07+2.6.22-14
nvidia-kernel-2.6.22-14-generic = 169.07-0ubuntu3+2.6.22-14.46
nvidia-kernel-common = 20051028+1ubuntu7
nvidia-new-kernel-source = 1:169.07+2.6.22-14
Slightly poorer results than with default drivers

UI2 with alpha blending menu fine.
Some tearing with fast motion at 720p on my Olevia Lcd TV


md
Abit

nvidia-glx = 1:1.0.9639+2.6.22.4-14.10+lmce2
nvidia-kernel-common = 20051028+1ubuntu7
UI2 with alpha blending menu fine.
Slight tearing with fast motion at 720p on my sony TV

biostar

md

nvidia-glx = 1:1.0.9639+2.6.22.4-14.10+lmce2
nvidia-kernel-common = 20051028+1ubuntu7
UI2 with alpha blending menu fine. 1280x1024 17 lcd monitor
No noticable tearing occasional stutter.



Will install  b3 Now

Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 18, 2008, 03:35:54 am
how do you get the driver information?

I have tried running 1080p again, with alpha blending - choosing the GeForce card and opengl in the web admin. The stuttering is apalling even with just the screensaver. Running top on an ssh session shows pluto screensaver, orbitergl and Xorg sucking up nearly 100% CPU almost all the time, even without menus displayed. It doesn't look like there is any hardware acceleration going on at all.

How can you tell if hardware acceleration is running and to what extent? Am I right in thinking that the nVidia 7050PV should have all te grunt in the world to do something like this, if only we had linux drivers that implemented those opengl functions of the hardware acceleration? I read that with OpenGL, if a function cannot be translated by the drivers into the correct accelerated function, then they fall back silently to software implementation without the application even knowing.... is this what is happening?

Are there any other options I can try?

I am going back to 1080p overlay now to check top again - now with just the screensaver, the CPU rarely goes over about 15%. But when I run VDR and watch live TV it shoots upto 100% again. The stuttering isn't as bad, but it is still almost unwatchable. Again this is with GeForce selected in the MD page and opengl as the acceleration, with no deinterlacing on the AMD64 DVD version with a 2.7GHz AMD dual core (5200+) 2GB RAM.

Same config - playing a mundane, low bit rate avi TV show, tearing and stuttering is very apparent - CPU is around 40% most of the time, with Xine consuming a very consistent 30%.....


Any ideas???????????
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 18, 2008, 03:59:47 am
Now I go into the LM/Video section - the driver is set to nvidia.... is that right, or should it be nv?

I launch the UI diag tool, and 1) the xine piece fails to open the mpg file immediately, does this every time, with input plugin failed to open mrl and then the path. 2) the animation, even without composite or masking speeds up and slows down, in top it is consuming 100% CPU. When I try to close both windows, although they appear to go away, the process keeps running and continues at 100%. I have to kill -9 it.

Also, as I had 2 uidiags running (cos I restarted it with the old one still there, not realising) I realised that the CPU usage must be per core as I am getting both showing 99%! I assumed it was total because I assumed that xine/mplayer/etc would use both cores, but it seems not as they only go up to 100%, not 200%....
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 18, 2008, 04:53:09 am
Gone to 720p with overlay only, no deinterlacing. Still getting tearing and not very smooth pans (in addition to terrible combing from something like interlacing) this is true for both HD and SD DVB broadcasts - with SD plutovdr is running around 17% fairly consistently, and total CPU not a great deal more than that (load ave around the 1.5 level if that helps) and in HD between xorg and plutovdr averaging around 65% CPU and not much else going on ....

There has to be something wrong somewhere!
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 18, 2008, 05:47:49 am
Just managed to get Envy 0.9.9 installed and updated the drivers and xorg.

Still in 720p/overlay, seems to have improved the tearing significantly, although panning is still a little rough. The tearing has all but gone in most video except high bitrate stuff. Just switching back to 1080p now to see what that looks like... I suspect it will deteriate, but by how much....
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: tkmedia on January 18, 2008, 07:21:44 am
Quote
how do you get the driver information?

Webadmin advanced - software - software versions.


Done Installing B3 now got cuaght up after installing myhdhomerun flipping through and got a Tom Petty Concert on Public TV HD

Anyway I am seing similar results as I did in b2.

Sounds very similar to what you are now seeing (colin) after the envy update

Unfortunately I have no 1080p to test it on.

Getting late have to turn in

more to follow on b3 testing.
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 18, 2008, 11:21:59 am
1080p/overlay is similarly reduced in tearing, but still quite a bit worse than 720p, and definitely unwatchable....

I have noticed that since running Envy, there is a new applet for nVidia, which offers lots of options to do with the GPU and video generally. One was syncing with the vertical sync.... I thought ahhh, that's it, that's what seems to be the biggest problem. Turned that on, but I don't really think it did anything. (it was off to start with). Is there anyway to tell if the settings in this app will effect LMCE? there are others that I haven't played with yet - has anybody looked at these, I thought that the Linux drivers were supposed to be quite lacking in the acceleration features, but this app has loads of options, and lists stacks of opengl functions that it supports.... that's the main thing isn't it? If it really does support these, then shouldn't we be getting all the benefits? Or perhaps they somehow have to be linked into the LMCE player part before they are used?
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 19, 2008, 09:09:53 pm
Thanks Andrew....

On 1 - will try without blending, just really want to be able to use it!! Someone else has this board - might have been tkmedia - and said that after beta2 the video was smooth even with blending... there seems to be 2 distinct effects, one is jerkiness in pans every second or so, the other is quite separate, and that is "flickeriness" which happens much more frequently, and seems to be the frame buffer not syncing with the vsync very well. eg taking longer than 1/50th second to draw. Are both these normal with the blending?

On 2 - I can get into VDR but it says no signal. I haven't got that file you mentioned for my area, on the question I asked before, isn't there someway I can ask it to auto tune, rather than use the file?

On 3 - yes CSS is definitely installed, I did it myself and waited for the tick to come and the confirmation message before carrying on. Rebooted since, and it still says its installed, plus it can play a DVD just fine.... just fails on the rip..... not to worry, I haven't investigated this one much yet...

Re: 1. I think it could well be a timing issue. But tearing and jerkiness are both the symptoms we see here. So UI2 + Overlay is our default until that can be fixed... and in that mode we get great playback performance.

Re: 2. VDR has no internal auto-tune or scan capability. Use the scan DVB util;

Try
scan -o vdr > channels.conf

Re: 3 It may just be that the DVD you are having problems with is one that will not RIP. We have have seen this with for example "Spiderman III". Have you tried any other DVD's?

Totallymaxed -

Ripping works fine now, even the DVD I was having problems with, and I worked out the scan, etc.

My Only concern now is the poor video performance! In live TV the frame rate is low at times (guess its dropping frames), jerky, with that vertical sync problem causing tearing. This applies to DVDs and mpg files right across the board...

I'm very disappointed because it is far beyond what I (or my other half would) could accept to replace even the TV much less the DVD player or my LinkTheatre.

I'm absolutely stumped at what I can do next - I specifically bought a full HD LCD TV, a Marantz SR AV amp, etc, etc and the Abit board with the HDMI out and 7050PV - the whole point of which is to have enough grunt to do HD even with HDCP. But it isn't even cutting it at 720p with overlay.

I've used Envy to install the latest drivers, and the nVidia app to control the GPU settings. It has several settings to enable syncing various accelerator functions with the vertical blanking period, and I have turned all those on...

What else can I do? Do you think that the chipset it capable but that 1) I have something not quite configured right or 2) the Linux drivers simply don't expose enough of the hardware acceleration to LMCE in opengl? Or is the board just not up to it? Are there any other combinations of settings I should try in the web admin for the video/accelerator, and on the nVidia app? CPU just seems to run hot for things I would have thought would be accelerated, but even when its low, around 30% for Xine or less, there are still very clear sync/tearing issues.... just don't understand what I'm doing wrong..

ANYthing you can suggest to help would be greatly appreciated!!!
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: totallymaxed on January 19, 2008, 09:17:51 pm
Thanks Andrew....

On 1 - will try without blending, just really want to be able to use it!! Someone else has this board - might have been tkmedia - and said that after beta2 the video was smooth even with blending... there seems to be 2 distinct effects, one is jerkiness in pans every second or so, the other is quite separate, and that is "flickeriness" which happens much more frequently, and seems to be the frame buffer not syncing with the vsync very well. eg taking longer than 1/50th second to draw. Are both these normal with the blending?

On 2 - I can get into VDR but it says no signal. I haven't got that file you mentioned for my area, on the question I asked before, isn't there someway I can ask it to auto tune, rather than use the file?

On 3 - yes CSS is definitely installed, I did it myself and waited for the tick to come and the confirmation message before carrying on. Rebooted since, and it still says its installed, plus it can play a DVD just fine.... just fails on the rip..... not to worry, I haven't investigated this one much yet...

Re: 1. I think it could well be a timing issue. But tearing and jerkiness are both the symptoms we see here. So UI2 + Overlay is our default until that can be fixed... and in that mode we get great playback performance.

Re: 2. VDR has no internal auto-tune or scan capability. Use the scan DVB util;

Try
scan -o vdr > channels.conf

Re: 3 It may just be that the DVD you are having problems with is one that will not RIP. We have have seen this with for example "Spiderman III". Have you tried any other DVD's?

Totallymaxed -

Ripping works fine now, even the DVD I was having problems with, and I worked out the scan, etc.

My Only concern now is the poor video performance! In live TV the frame rate is low at times (guess its dropping frames), jerky, with that vertical sync problem causing tearing. This applies to DVDs and mpg files right across the board...

I'm very disappointed because it is far beyond what I (or my other half would) could accept to replace even the TV much less the DVD player or my LinkTheatre.

I'm absolutely stumped at what I can do next - I specifically bought a full HD LCD TV, a Marantz SR AV amp, etc, etc and the Abit board with the HDMI out and 7050PV - the whole point of which is to have enough grunt to do HD even with HDCP. But it isn't even cutting it at 720p with overlay.

I've used Envy to install the latest drivers, and the nVidia app to control the GPU settings. It has several settings to enable syncing various accelerator functions with the vertical blanking period, and I have turned all those on...

What else can I do? Do you think that the chipset it capable but that 1) I have something not quite configured right or 2) the Linux drivers simply don't expose enough of the hardware acceleration to LMCE in opengl? Or is the board just not up to it? Are there any other combinations of settings I should try in the web admin for the video/accelerator, and on the nVidia app? CPU just seems to run hot for things I would have thought would be accelerated, but even when its low, around 30% for Xine or less, there are still very clear sync/tearing issues.... just don't understand what I'm doing wrong..

ANYthing you can suggest to help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Hmmm... If I had a 7050 chipset  enabled motherboard I could say... but I don't. All I can say that 7050 chipset based motherboards should work fine. Our 6150 & 6100 based onboard motherboards work fine as do motherboards where we add either 6200 or 7300 nVidia cards. The 7050 should work fine... my gut feeling is that its more likely to be an xorg settings issue as opposed to a fundamental problem with the 7050 chipset. My suggestion is to try to adjust some of the xorg.conf settings to fix the tearing problem;

look at this thread... this may be of some helo to you;

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=3697.msg20526#msg20526 (http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=3697.msg20526#msg20526)
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 19, 2008, 09:35:32 pm
Thanks Andrew....

On 1 - will try without blending, just really want to be able to use it!! Someone else has this board - might have been tkmedia - and said that after beta2 the video was smooth even with blending... there seems to be 2 distinct effects, one is jerkiness in pans every second or so, the other is quite separate, and that is "flickeriness" which happens much more frequently, and seems to be the frame buffer not syncing with the vsync very well. eg taking longer than 1/50th second to draw. Are both these normal with the blending?

On 2 - I can get into VDR but it says no signal. I haven't got that file you mentioned for my area, on the question I asked before, isn't there someway I can ask it to auto tune, rather than use the file?

On 3 - yes CSS is definitely installed, I did it myself and waited for the tick to come and the confirmation message before carrying on. Rebooted since, and it still says its installed, plus it can play a DVD just fine.... just fails on the rip..... not to worry, I haven't investigated this one much yet...

Re: 1. I think it could well be a timing issue. But tearing and jerkiness are both the symptoms we see here. So UI2 + Overlay is our default until that can be fixed... and in that mode we get great playback performance.

Re: 2. VDR has no internal auto-tune or scan capability. Use the scan DVB util;

Try
scan -o vdr > channels.conf

Re: 3 It may just be that the DVD you are having problems with is one that will not RIP. We have have seen this with for example "Spiderman III". Have you tried any other DVD's?

Totallymaxed -

Ripping works fine now, even the DVD I was having problems with, and I worked out the scan, etc.

My Only concern now is the poor video performance! In live TV the frame rate is low at times (guess its dropping frames), jerky, with that vertical sync problem causing tearing. This applies to DVDs and mpg files right across the board...

I'm very disappointed because it is far beyond what I (or my other half would) could accept to replace even the TV much less the DVD player or my LinkTheatre.

I'm absolutely stumped at what I can do next - I specifically bought a full HD LCD TV, a Marantz SR AV amp, etc, etc and the Abit board with the HDMI out and 7050PV - the whole point of which is to have enough grunt to do HD even with HDCP. But it isn't even cutting it at 720p with overlay.

I've used Envy to install the latest drivers, and the nVidia app to control the GPU settings. It has several settings to enable syncing various accelerator functions with the vertical blanking period, and I have turned all those on...

What else can I do? Do you think that the chipset it capable but that 1) I have something not quite configured right or 2) the Linux drivers simply don't expose enough of the hardware acceleration to LMCE in opengl? Or is the board just not up to it? Are there any other combinations of settings I should try in the web admin for the video/accelerator, and on the nVidia app? CPU just seems to run hot for things I would have thought would be accelerated, but even when its low, around 30% for Xine or less, there are still very clear sync/tearing issues.... just don't understand what I'm doing wrong..

ANYthing you can suggest to help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Hmmm... If I had a 7050 chipset  enabled motherboard I could say... but I don't. All I can say that 7050 chipset based motherboards should work fine. Our 6150 & 6100 based onboard motherboards work fine as do motherboards where we add either 6200 or 7300 nVidia cards. The 7050 should work fine... my gut feeling is that its more likely to be an xorg settings issue as opposed to a fundamental problem with the 7050 chipset. My suggestion is to try to adjust some of the xorg.conf settings to fix the tearing problem;

look at this thread... this may be of some helo to you;

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=3697.msg20526#msg20526 (http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=3697.msg20526#msg20526)

Just comparing the chipsets in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units the 7050PV is essentially exactly the same performance as the 6100 (425MP/s and 850MT/s) with the 6150 being very slightly faster (at 475 and 950), all support upto opengl 2.0.... so it should be comparable.... grrr! As we are talking about video, I'm assuming that the texel/s wouldn't play a part... is that right? But the fill rate for pixels/s would?? Is that the fundamental performance benchmark? Or are they only really for animation as well? Nothing seems to indicate a performance standard for how fast the decoders/encoders work... but then again, I guess the overlaying/blending/deinterlacing/etc all require GPU processing, so maybe the pixels/s is important.... hmmm I wonder if there are any GPU/graphics experts on the board anywhere...

Frankly Xorg.conf scares me! I'm not a Linux person, and my first few experiences of editing that file were confusing and got me into alsorts of knots (mostly modline stuff to deal with i950 chipsets, which I think everybody is familiar with!) Any suggestions on which sections and keywords I should be looking at? Will be looking at that thread in the meantime (assuming the bits Richard talks about)
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on January 20, 2008, 12:53:23 am
OK, I have done as much as I think I can in xorg.conf -

The default TV Standard string that the AV Wizard puts in is 1080p, but xorg doesn't recognise this and "default to NTSC-M". I took a guess based on RichardP's comments about HD720p and changed this to HD1080p, and now xorg recognises it correctly - I will Mantis this. But it made no difference to my problem.

ARGB GLX visuals was disabled in the log file, enabled this successfully - made no difference to the problem - I think this is only for transparencies anyway, and I am in overlay mode

Added:
Section "Module"
        Load    "i2c"
        Load    "bitmap"
        Load    "ddc"
        Load    "dri"
        Load    "extmod"
        Load    "freetype"
        Load    "glx"
        Load    "int10"
        Load    "type1"
        Load    "vbe"
        Load "record"
        Load "xtrap"
        Load "speedo"
        Load "GLcore"
        Load "v4l"
EndSection

Per Posterberg's comments. This was accepted and seems to run fine except it can't start "type1" - no improvement to my issue

Tried enabling EDID detection at 2 locations in the xorg file. This was accepted, but it screws up the size of the screen with that panning effect on a virtual desktop. No improvement of the main issue. Changed this one back to false in both locations.

The log files says that "backing store disabled" - seems to be to do with windows that are obscured, and the redraw of them when they are re-exposed, rather than to do with the frame buffer/switching/flipping, etc as I originally thought. So I guess this won't make any difference - didn't experiment with it.


Anybody?? Suggestions??
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Mikeje25 on February 11, 2008, 06:28:07 pm
I also have the video tearing problem while playback media (dvd, divx, recorded shows, etc.)

I also tried all the things Colinjones have tried, switched to other modelines, etc.... but i still have the problem even with UI1 on 720p.

After reading Colinjones' posts and my used hardware :

Motherboard : Asrock ALiveNF7G-HDready (NVIDIA® GeForce 7050 / nForce 630A MCP Chipsets)
CPU : AMD Athlon 64 X2 BE-2400
MEM : 2x 1Gb DDR2
TV : Toshiba 42z3030d (Full-HD 1080p)
DVI2HDMI cable

I think that it has something to do with the DVI2HDMI cable or the combination Nvidia7050 and a Full HD 1080p big lcd screen.

Hope someone has any more suggestions?

Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Zaerc on February 11, 2008, 07:37:31 pm
How is the load on the CPU and memory?  And I'm assuming the media is stored locally so we could rule out the network.
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: 1audio on February 11, 2008, 07:38:43 pm
The problems are a mix of the video driver and Xine/MPlayer's ways of talking to the drivers. I get OK results from 704 using the default driver (96XX) on 1080p to a 1080p display. I can see some artifacts and I get 100% CPU with an overlay UI. I think the biggest culprit is xorg. The issue with the tearing is a VSync issue- where the frame is being updated asynchronously with the video refresh so you see two frames spliced on screen. For the best video I would like to send the decoded unprocessed video at its native rate to the display and let the display de-interlace and scale the image. Computers are organized to prevent this, so they can mix images on a common screen.
Xine has descaler's image processing internal but the commands to optimize it are pretty arcane. When I fiddled with it I was never sure I was actually changing anything. There seems to be two seperate Xine's installed. We should be able to get very good video with that all working.
I have not dug this deep into 710. If I upgrade and run into a lot of problems I will be deep in the doghouse so not yet. . .
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Mikeje25 on February 11, 2008, 08:19:27 pm
How is the load on the CPU and memory?  And I'm assuming the media is stored locally so we could rule out the network.

When i play a DVD form the the local dvd-rom player the cpu load is between 2% and 8%.

The mem used when beginning to play the dvd was 800Mb ater 15 minutes the system has 1100Mb used. Is this growth normal?
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Zaerc on February 12, 2008, 01:38:10 am
Well memory can be a bit tricky to see because linux uses all the memory it doesn't need for buffers and as diskcache.  If you look at the output of "free", for example:
$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1519       1478         40          0        129        958
-/+ buffers/cache:        390       1129
Swap:         2925         37       2888


You should really look at the second line (-/+ buffers/cache:) to see what the system itself is actually using, otherwise it will seem like the memory is always full while in fact most of it is available.
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Mikeje25 on February 12, 2008, 08:04:06 pm
Thx for the mem tip.

The mem in use is around 300 Mb while playing a DVD so I think this is fine cause the MD has a lot more of memory.

I found another strange thing happening. I wanted to try 1080p on this MD so i did the following :

- Changed in the webadmin the value "video settings" to "1920 1080/50"
- Changed in the webadmin the value "TV standard" to "1080p"
- Changed in xorg.conf the "Modeline" to "Modeline        "1920x1080" 148.500 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1116 1121 1125 +hsync +vsync"

This modeline is the recommended modeline for 1920/1080@50 for my Toshiba 42z303d TV.

After a restart of the MD there is no picture at all, when i opened again the xorg.conf something changed my modeline to this values :

Modeline        "1920x1080"     143.55 1920 1952 2596 2528    1080 1103 1112 1135

it also changed the HorizSync en Refresh to other values.

How is this happening and what to do about it? Maybe if i can change the modeline to what the TV wants the tearing will resolve.

(Already found another topic about the modeline setting, will try that later hope it will help)
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Zaerc on February 13, 2008, 12:06:33 am
See: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers#LinuxMCE_keeps_reconfiguring_my_display_settings about that problem.
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Mikeje25 on February 13, 2008, 06:39:45 pm
See: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers#LinuxMCE_keeps_reconfiguring_my_display_settings about that problem.

Thanks for the link. I have tried my modelines succesfully now. But the video playbacked still has the frame tearing issue. Windhoos doesn't have this problem with the same hardware  :'(

I like LinuxMce and i want it to be perfect, but with this video tearing it is not usefull for me. Please HELP!

OK. I managed it with some modeline changes in xorg.conf to get no frame tearing with UI1. But with "UI2 medium" there is still frame tearing. I want to if I will be able to use UI2 when i buy a new/better graphic card? If yes... which NVidia graphic card is tested as good with UI2 on 720p or 1080p?
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: totallymaxed on February 16, 2008, 07:07:58 pm
See: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers#LinuxMCE_keeps_reconfiguring_my_display_settings about that problem.

Thanks for the link. I have tried my modelines succesfully now. But the video playbacked still has the frame tearing issue. Windhoos doesn't have this problem with the same hardware  :'(

I like LinuxMce and i want it to be perfect, but with this video tearing it is not usefull for me. Please HELP!

OK. I managed it with some modeline changes in xorg.conf to get no frame tearing with UI1. But with "UI2 medium" there is still frame tearing. I want to if I will be able to use UI2 when i buy a new/better graphic card? If yes... which NVidia graphic card is tested as good with UI2 on 720p or 1080p?

Get an nVidia 6200 card ;-)

Andrew
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: struggler on May 08, 2008, 05:52:38 pm
See: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers#LinuxMCE_keeps_reconfiguring_my_display_settings about that problem.

Thanks for the link. I have tried my modelines succesfully now. But the video playbacked still has the frame tearing issue. Windhoos doesn't have this problem with the same hardware  :'(

I like LinuxMce and i want it to be perfect, but with this video tearing it is not usefull for me. Please HELP!

OK. I managed it with some modeline changes in xorg.conf to get no frame tearing with UI1. But with "UI2 medium" there is still frame tearing. I want to if I will be able to use UI2 when i buy a new/better graphic card? If yes... which NVidia graphic card is tested as good with UI2 on 720p or 1080p?

Get an nVidia 6200 card ;-)

Andrew

I'm having the same tearing problem and I bought a 6200 after reading this but with no satisfactory results. My images still tear at 720p in UI2 with alpha blending.

totallymaxed could you please explain to me if you've done any tweak to make it work perfectly?

Thank you in advance
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: colinjones on May 09, 2008, 12:00:36 am
If you read back through totallymaxed's postings you will see that he says it always tears with Alpha blending - they don't use it, just overlay for that reason. The Linux drivers just seem to implement enough of the hardware acceleration. Although at least on person on this forum has stated that they have Alpha running with no tearing, I think this is the exception not the rule...
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: Itsik on May 09, 2008, 12:21:18 am
I also have alpha with no tearing on the same abit board. Did you try tweaking your graphics memory in the bios? I've set mine to 256mb for graphics, maybe that will help ...
Title: Re: 0710 Beta3 issues...
Post by: struggler on May 09, 2008, 04:47:44 pm
I also have alpha with no tearing on the same abit board. Did you try tweaking your graphics memory in the bios? I've set mine to 256mb for graphics, maybe that will help ...

Itsik,
I already have that setup on BIOS with no results. You must have something different from me.
Can you please post your xorg.conf? Which is your system configuration (CPU, RAM, etc.)

Thanks
JD