[mythtv-users] Fast CPU, DMA enabled on HD, Xv enabled, still getting pauses in Live TV

[Joe V]

This is completely strange, I don't understand it.

I upgraded to an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (real speed,
2GHz), with an ECS KS57A Pro motherboard today.  The
motherboard isn't the greatest, but for $89.99 for the
combo, you can't really beat that.

Anyway, I have my profile for Live TV setup for
480x480, RTJPEG, MP3 Audio compression, level 4
(middle of the pack or so).  When I run "top", I see
that mythbackend ranges from 20-43% (CPU), and that
mythfrontend ranges from 3-15%.  I have DMA enabled on
my hard drive (hdparm shows this), XVideo is enabled
on the second head of the Matrox G400 I'm using.  The
card being used is a Leadtek Winfast TV XP 2000 Deluxe
(bttv), and I'm using the 2.4.21 kernel, unpatched
from kernel.org.

Despite this, I still get a stutter in the video/audio
every now and then (if you average it out, probably
once every ten minutes).  The output of "top" doesn't
seem to spike any, so I don't think that it's the CPU
not being powerful enough (it should be).

I've tried a bunch of things...  Swapping RAM
(currently I'm using PC133, but I took the DDR400 from
my desktop out and tried it), I've tried not enabling
the second head on the Matrox (using a monitor), using
ALSA and OSS, using KDE and Blackbox, heck, almost
everything I could think of except changing the video
card (maybe that's it?).  I've also turned off
unnecessary services in Red Hat 9 (turned off
sendmail, cups, etc.).

Does anybody have any further suggestions?  At this
point, I'm almost suspecting a hardware problem of
some sort.

-- Joe

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