0710 Beta3 issues...

[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...

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!!!

[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?

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

[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...

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

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)

[colinjones]

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??

[Mikeje25]

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?

[Zaerc]

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.

[1audio]

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. . .

[Mikeje25]

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?

[Zaerc]

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.

[Mikeje25]

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)

[Zaerc]

See: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers#LinuxMCE_keeps_reconfiguring_my_display_settings about that problem.

[Mikeje25]

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?

[totallymaxed]

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

[struggler]

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

[colinjones]

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...