[mythtv-users] VAAPI / OpenGL and myth 0.26 - black screen on playback

[George Nassas]

On 2013-10-03, at 12:54 PM, Andrey Zhunev wrote:

> Can you please post a log of your mythfrontend since a fresh startup
> and until playing a video?

This is the frontend playing an mpeg2 file: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=W3Tn1R3V and this is mythavtest playing a ted talk which is h.264: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=a3unGPyj

Instead of navigating through the frontend’s menus you can cut to the chase and use mythavtest to simply play back a file. It takes the same -v options for verbosity. It also has -t --infile options where it will attempt to decode, but not display, a video and that would isolate if your problem is at the decoder level (vaapi) or the render level (vaapiopengl). From what I can see, and I’m not an expert nor do I play one on TV, the issue seems to be on the render side which is your opengl setup.

>> As a test, can you get video playback with mplayer?
> Good idea, but ... where do you get a recent mplayer from?
> The one at atrpms doesn't seem to know of vaapi ('-vo help' doesn't
> even list it).

I don’t. I’m on debian and pick up my mplayer from deb-multimedia but that’s not an option for you. How about glxgears or any other sample program? The particular program isn’t crucial, the basic idea is if other programs put up their output fine then it must be what myth is doing while if nothing is able to do anything then likely your system is hosed.

> I still think the problem is with this part, right when I start
> mythfrontend:
> 
> 2013-10-03 20:29:38.835205 I [4735/4735] CoreContext mythmainwindow.cpp:1039 (Init) - Trying the OpenGL painter
> 2013-10-03 20:29:38.840994 W [4735/4735] CoreContext mythrender_opengl.cpp:66 (Create) - OpenGL: Could not determine whether Sync to VBlank is enabled.
> 2013-10-03 20:29:38.851897 W [4735/4735] CoreContext mythrender_opengl.cpp:142 (IsRecommendedRenderer) - OpenGL: OpenGL is using software rendering.
> 2013-10-03 20:29:38.851965 W [4735/4735] CoreContext mythmainwindow.cpp:1058 (Init) - OpenGL painter not recommended with this system's hardware/drivers. Falling back to Qt painter.

Whoops! I should have read this first. Definitely your opengl is the culprit.

> But I can't figure out what is causing it....

It sounded like you were installing drivers willy nilly from different repos and probably you now have half of this hand half of that. Personally I would uninstall all the X stuff, pick the repo that’s normal/tested for your distribution, and then reinstall all the X binaries but this time getting only the ones that were built to work with each other.

- George

P.S. As an aside, and you may have already answered this elsewhere, what packages do you have for glx libraries? This is what I have on my debian stable box:

libgl1-mesa-glx/wheezy uptodate 8.0.5-4+deb7u2
libva-glx1/wheezy uptodate 1.0.15-4
libxcb-glx0/wheezy uptodate 1.8.1-2+deb7u1