[mythtv-users] audio/video stutter

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 03:11:22AM -0700, tgate wrote:
>   -Within myth the HD audio/video go into a play-pause cycle.  Different
> timings based on the settings, but it never goes away.
> 
> I'm wondering if it could have something to do with the ring buffer?

I did some package updates on my system recently (libc6 
upgrade, XFree to XOrg, etc.) and started having some 
stuttering, play/pause cycles and ultimately some kernel 
panics.  Most of the useful information had scrolled off 
the screen, but there were some messages about resetting 
the IDE and some "drive not ready" errors.  I checked SMART 
and everything was fine.  My load averages also shot up to 
0.65 during recording, whereas they had never been above 
0.10 before, and my remote front-end would crash its X 
session(!) because of whatever was happening inside 
mythfrontend.  The frontend hasn't been upgraded since it 
was first installed, so whatever is crashing the frontend 
is originating on the backend.  Part of the problem turned 
out to be the fact that my BIOS had decided to assign the 
same IRQ to all three IDE channels *and* the ivtv board 
*and* the ethernet adaptor (and yes, I did have "non-PnP 
OS" selected).  I went into the PCI settings and manually 
forced the cards onto different IRQs and the load went back 
down to 0.05 while doing simultaneous record and playback.  
I thought I had the problem solved, but then after watching 
live TV for about 5 minutes the back-end kernel had another 
panic with the same symptoms.  I recompiled my ivtv driver 
(just in case) but don't think it will accomplish much.  
I'm starting to run out of ideas....

BTW, my ivtv driver doesn't like the firmware:
ivtv: Encoder revision: 0x02050032
ivtv: Encoder Firmware may be buggy, use version 0x02040011
ivtv: Configuring WinTV PVR 250 card with 5 streams

Well, I'd *love* to use version 0x02040011 if that would 
help, but haven't the slightest idea where I would get it 
or how I would load it.  Hippauge changed the internal 
structure of the DLL on their Windows installation CD-Rom 
so that the firmware-extraction script that came with ivtv 
doesn't work.

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