Video stuttering

[gazlang]

I know that the line

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UseEvents = True
Has been added to xorg.conf since the beta release of 0710. It apparently helps reduce tearing with some nvidia chips.

You could try removing that to start.

Also, being that the framerate drops after some usage time I wonder if it is to do with verbose logging. A simlar problem existed with mythtv in 0704.

I do not see this stuttering myself, and I am using the x64 version. My tv does go a bit stuttery every now and then, followed by a message in the top left saying my additional hard drives were detected. This leads me to believe the plug and play engine slows me down...why does it need to keep on detecting my hardware??? Random!

[colinjones]

skeptic

In another thread you may have seen my comments on a similar point - from your post I decided to rebuild using i386 (for the first time) to see if that made any difference. I have had a crash a couple of times in AMD64 and now once in i386, overnight, which I never used to get prior to RC2, but the core hasn't been running long enough to see for sure that the stuttering comes in after time - I certainly was getting exactly your issue under AMD64, and I have never had that before.  NB: i have bitched and whinged about stuttering video for a long time under every build so far in many threads, but that is a static amount of stutter that never got worse and is clearly unrelated to this issue (i think it is a hardware issue and I am going to rebuild with a new video card later this week).

I haven't tried the reload instead of reboot yet - if it starts happening under i386 again i will try that and get back to you, I have a gut feel that it is still happening under i386 and will get bad enough to be sure if I leave it running long enough.

I ran the grep and got a count of 165 under i386 (never tried it on AMD64), did a reboot and ran it again and got 162 after a couple of minutes.

I definitely get the impression that RC2 is implicated here, but i can't put my finger on exactly what, but i do think we need to keep this thread going, as you say. Something is going on.

BTW gazlang, i had already tried your suggestion of useevents prior to RC2 to try and solve my other stuttering issue - it didn't fix it, but i left the option in there anyway, and it definitely did not cause this increasing stutter effect, I only noticed that after going to RC2

As an aside - at least once when the core "crashed" under i386, the interface was completely frozen and I couldn't browse the Internet from the internal network because DNS on the core wasn't working, but interestingly, routing to the external network and internet was still working fine!

[skeptic]

I haven't had any crashes under 704 AMD64, 710 AMD64 betas, or 710 i386 final.  Somewhere between the 710 beta and the 710 final (probably RC2 based on other posts), the stuttering/loss of framerate started.

I ran a while loop counting the number of net connections to/from port 3450 and it stayed at 169 for 24+ hours, so I don't think that's the issue.  CPU utilization memory use, etc. are all low so I'm really stumped.  Unfortunately I'm pretty clueless when it comes to databases so if it's a db issue I wouldn't know where to  start. 

If anyone has any ideas at all I'm happy to try them out.

[colinjones]

BTW, RC2 is the final version (confusing, I know!)

[skeptic]

Doh!  I didn't realize that release candidate 2 was the final. 

[williammanda]

Any news?

[colinjones]

I still haven't seen the progressive slow down, but I have rebuilt a couple of times since and keep rebooting for various reasons so it probably hasn't had time to build up yet if it is still doing it.

The grep still gives me 165-169, I have put in a 7300GT card now - and yes I also get the "Z" in the middle of the screen... bizarre, I can't explain why it would be a Z shape! Logically I can easily see why it would be a clean horizontal line, but a Z shape doesn't make sense to me! Have gone back to Overlay mode as the tearing was unbearable even with a chipset that is supposed to be capable of at least 4-8 times the rendering speed (although, granted, this is in 3D rendering, which wouldn't really effect the type of OpenGL graphics the UI is doing)

[williammanda]

I have a 7300GT card in a MD and a 7300 LE in the core, both with 512 MB. I too see alittle tearing but it is bearable. It seems like every 2 - 3 days the stuttering starts and I reload the router, then it is OK. Has anyone used the 9600GT?

[williammanda]

I got another computer core 2 quad 9300, 4 GB ram, intel dx38bt motherboard. Using the 7300 LE video card. I haven't seen the stuttering yet.

[skeptic]

Today when I saw the stuttering/low frame rate issue instead of doing a quick reload I decided to take another look at the system.  What I found was the Xine_Player  process was using ~37% of the cpu and had used 184+ CPU minutes.  I killed that process (ssh in from another computer) and as expected the currently playing movie stopped and it took me back to the main menu.  I restarted the same movie and this time it played fine and Xine_Player cpu use is bouncing between 1% and 6%. 

I'm not sure if Xine_Player is supposed to exit after each movie and isn't, or of there is some other issue but the problem is definitely with Xine_Player.  I'm not really sure where to go from here.  Xine_Player is a binary not a wrapper script so it's not something I can look into, and I'm not sure if the intended use is to exit after each movie or stay running.  I'm also beginning to wonder if it's related to how I/we exit movies and go back to the main menu.

[royw]

I'm not sure if Xine_Player is supposed to exit after each movie and isn't, or of there is some other issue but the problem is definitely with Xine_Player.  I'm not really sure where to go from here.  Xine_Player is a binary not a wrapper script so it's not something I can look into, and I'm not sure if the intended use is to exit after each movie or stay running.  I'm also beginning to wonder if it's related to how I/we exit movies and go back to the main menu.

I regularly experience the problem.  Just a data point, I use the Nokia N800 orbiter and exit movies by pressing the off icon in the lower right hand corner of the UI-1 display during the credits (i.e., I don't let the movie finish).

HTH,
Roy

[tschak909]

The Xine_Player is a DCE device, and thus is always running, even when a video is not playing.

-Thom

[colinjones]

and a router reload does restart the dce devices....
That could point to a problem in the xine one couldn't it?
How can we troubleshoot it?

[tschak909]

valgrind?

-Thom

[colinjones]

valgrind?

-Thom

hmmm.... do the DCE devices get started from a script that could have the valgrind command prefixed to? Is it easy to use?