[mythtv-users] Big Plea For Help

[Marc Randolph]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Mark
Garland<mythtvusers at markgarland.co.uk> wrote:
> [...]
> I’m running Ubuntu 9.04, with KDE installed on top, and a combined
> frontend/backend running myth 0.21.0+fixes19961-0ubuntu8 installed out of
> the repositories.  I keep the system up to date.
>
> The main issue I get random locking – either during recorded shows, channel
> changing, or live tv.
>
> Sometimes it locks and tells me that it is “Timed out waiting for free video
> buffers”, sometimes it’s a collection of
> “RingBuf(/video/1001_20090717183822.mpg): Waited x seconds for data to
> become available...”, sometimes the UI locks but the video keeps playing
> with no sound with masses of “AddAudioData():p1: Audio buffer overflow,
> audio data lost!”.  Usually there are “prebuffering pause” and “Prebuffer
> wait timed out 10 times”.
>
> Generally, after 5mins or so, I’m taken back to the menus, but during that
> time the frontend UI is unresponsive.
> [...]
> With video,
>
> Drivers for the 780g are a pain.
>
> I’m currently running the xf86-ati-radeon opensource driver, and get pretty
> good results.
>
> Last night, (thanks Steve Milner for the tip), I tried version 9.6 of the
> proprietary fglrx driver and followed
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ATI_Proprietary_Driver.  This worked well, but
> did give a lot of tearing which apparently cannot be resolved.
>
> I’ve also tried the xf86-ati-radeonhd driver, which gave pretty bad
> performance.

It is possible you are having more than one problem.  First off, what
video profile(s) have you tried?

If I'm following you correctly here, it appears you are saying that
you do not get the same errors when using other video drivers.  Yes,
you get other problems that make it unusable, but you still may be
able to draw a conclusion about the original problem.  I'm far from an
expert on video card matters, but if that's the case, I would
personally continue down that route.  Can you remove out the ATI
drivers all together and just use VGA to a monitor as a test bed?

This thread contains a number of good things to check:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/364403

I assume you've seen this:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Troubleshooting:NVP:_Timed_out_waiting_for_free_video_buffers

   Marc