[mythtv-users] 0.19 XvMC and stutter (was: Re: xvmc on 0.19 and deciding between nvidia and s3 unichrome)

[Jesse Guardiani]

Andrew Kuan wrote:
> For whatever it's worth, HD content plays just fine for me with XvMC 
> turned on as long as there's no OSD and as long as I've paused for a 
> few seconds to create a bit of a buffer. What's unacceptable is that 
> whenever XvMC is turned on and there's any OSD overlayed on any 
> content -- HD or standard def -- everything gets stuttery and MythTV 
> becomes difficult to control.

The terrible stutter while the XvMC OSD is displayed is gone for me in 
0.19. But my content is purely SD, not HD.
The OSD can be made to display in color in 0.19 using this hack, which 
ships with 0.19, but isn't enabled by default:
    http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/7569

I still get some stutter and some corresponding errors from mythfrontend 
about audio underruns or buffer underruns,
but it's not usually not often enough or bad enough to notice. I think 
those stutters are either sound card or MySQL
related. Not sure. My disk array is 2x250G SATA in software RAID-1, and 
I only have one PVR-350 for recording,
so I doubt the problem is disk throughput. And my CPU is never more than 
20% loaded (80% idle) when the stutters
occur.

NOTE: I'm running Gentoo with a 2.6.15 kernel and an AGP nividia FX 5200 
(driver ver 7676) with a
Celeron D 2.93ghz proc. and 1GB of DDR 3200.

-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at wingnet.net