0710 Beta3 issues...

[colinjones]

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...

[totallymaxed]

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

[colinjones]

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...

[Zaerc]

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

[totallymaxed]

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?

[tkmedia]

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.

[colinjones]

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!

[tkmedia]

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.)

[tkmedia]

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

[colinjones]

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??

[colinjones]

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%....

[colinjones]

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!

[colinjones]

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....

[tkmedia]

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.

[colinjones]

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?