[mythtv-users] Slight Occasional Hiccup

[Wood, Mike]

Hey Gang,

I'm am so so close to permanently switching my family room over to Myth, but
I still get occasional hiccups in sound/video during live TV that I just
can't seem to get rid of.  Is this normal and I'm being too critical?  Or
should the sound/video be totally hiccup free?  Personally, I love Myth
regardless and I could live with the occasional blip, but the wife & kids
are not as forgiving unfortunately. :-(

I'm using Myth from CVS as of yesterday on a PIII 650mhz with a single
PVR-250, 384mb ram----as a combined Frontend/Backend.  The drives are all
fast & the network is 100mbit hard wired.  I also updated my ivtv drivers to
CVS as of yesterday as well.  I'm using RH9.0 with kernel 2.4.20-20.9.  When
I run TOP during live TV, my CPU remains 35%-45% idle.  

I actually believe this is somehow sound related because the hiccups seem to
occur more frequently when there is considerable background noise.  For
instance, during a commercial with a lot of music in the background...or a
few weeks ago, it was very noticeable while watching US Open
Tennis....between points when there was a lot of crowd applause in the
background, I got lots of hiccups.  Has anyone noticed this behavior?  I'm
using Alsa 9.6. with a cheapo C-Media card...could the card just not be up
to the task?

I've tried every possible combination of the options in myth....Jitter
Reduction, Experimental A/V Sync, Audio Buffers, etc....but with no
luck...although some seem to improve things a bit, but nothing is 100% yet.
I've also tried various combinations of options within the IVTV driver, at
both 480x480 and 720x480.  I actually think running Live TV at 720x480 is a
bit better, but again, not perfect..and this could just be my imagination as
well.

I've also watched the frontend & backend log files during Live TV and
nothing out of the ordinary seem to be occurring during the hiccups.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd appreciate it.  I'd love to clear
this up.  Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Mike