Folks,

Sometime in the R5F27 era I purchased a FX5200 card for SD only viewing/playback at the suggestion of TJC and others . With this setup everything was fine with SVIDEO out. Now ever since I did an automatic upgrade to R5.5, the red is oversatuarated and there are pauses (stutters) in the video from time to time even though top shows minimal CPU or I/O utilization. Is there a step I missed or is this a known problem?

Kevin

Doesn't sound familiar. Pauses might be the RRD issue, see the Hints for more on that.

As for funky video effects...

- Make sure that the resolution that X uses is as close to native as possible. For NTSC I recommend using 640x480 to minimize scaling effects. I just about tore my hair out trying to figure out why my colors were washed out and blacks and whites were shades of gray until I switched from 800x600 to 640x480.

- Playback a recording, use the F key to bring up the output adjustments, and make sure they're neutral ((50% for most stuff, but 0 for Hue)

- Run nvidia-settings to make sure that you don't have any strange settings there.

- After you've one all of the above, try making appropriate adjustments with nvidia-settings.

BTW - Does this happen with both old and new recordings and video/optical disc playback? If it's just new recordings you may have some recording profile that needs adjustment.

Oh, you may also want to clean up the duplicate post... http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18691

I will look into the RRD issue...

It was using 800x600, I changed it to 640x480 with effectively same redness. I also forgot to mention that the OSD also flickers at about once a second which it did not do before when doing an i from the keyboard for instance.

Playback seems to be slightly more pronounced with new recordings than old but both are "redder" than before. We were also watching a show last night where they were talking about the very blue ocean. It was pea green as we were watching. When we watched the same show live on TV earlier, the ocean was blue and the dominant red was also not present. F does not do anything from the keyboard (do not have LIRC setup)

nvidia-settings did not have any obvious strangeness. DVD playback seemed to be no difference in hue (normal) but I selected a nonCSS DVD which was pretty red to begin with.

I recall when I had tinny sound in R5F27 there was some variables I set somewhere to control sound and video but I do not remember where that was set. I am using directv.pl to do IR stuff.

I am seeing identical jerky playback issues.

I did a fresh install on previously working hardware. I have a PVR-150 and a Gefore MX 4000 card (AGP). The one change I made was moving from an IDE to a SATA drive.

My colours are ok but I get the video stutter with some blocking and the OSD flickering everty 1 second or so which usually precedes the video stutter. If I start watching LiveTV or a recording and don't touch anything it seems fine for a moment but as soon as I bring up the OSD or adjust anything the jerkiness starts.

It happens in recordings as well.

The board is older, the processor is a Sempron 1600Mhz but it worked fine with R5F27.

I will try disabling RRD and see if that helps but any other feedback is highly welcome.

Thanks,

-Jeff

PS - R5.5 install is BRILLIANT. Fastest Knoppmyth install ever! Everything worked out of the box, save for this performance issue.

PPS - Disabled folding at home (/etc/ini.td/folding@home configure) and also RRD (rrd_Configure.sh) and it has improved a bit but I can still induce the video jerkiness. Load seems very low even during playback.

Well I've also tried changing my /mth partition filetype to xfs for improved performance. That hasn't solved the problem either.

It definitely appears to be around the Nvidia driver/card and doing overlays that causes the jerkiness/blockiness. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

-Jeff

Which nvidia driver is it using? (console>nvidia-settings) and have you tried up or downgrading?

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

It is using:

ii nvidia-glx-legacy-96xx 96.43.05-1 NVIDIA binary Xorg driver (96xx legacy version)
ii nvidia-kernel-common 20051028+1-0.1 NVIDIA binary kernel module common files
ii nvidia-kernel-legacy-96xx-2.6.23-chw-4 96.43.05-1+2.6.23-chw-4-10.00.Custom NVIDIA binary kernel modu

And I did try downgrading last night, although I ended up pooching my system. Mythfrontend wouldn't start at all on the 87xx driver. I have not tried upgrading as my card is quite old.

-Jeff

During testing I was playing back both MPEG-2 recordings from a PVR card and MPEG-4 videos at SDTV resolutions, and MPEG-2 samples at various HDTV resolutions with no problems. This was on my old Shuttle box which has minimal memory and Nforce2 IGP (MX4) graphics using the 96.43.05-1 driver. The key was correcting my X configuration and Nvidia settings to address the UseEvents issues as discussed in the R5.5 Hints.

That box does have a somewhat faster CPU (Athlon XP +2400) but it wasn't anywhere close to being CPU bound.

- Look at the video driver fixes and diagnostic walkthroughs pointed to by the Hints.

- Check your log files and top for any issues.

- Check for the RRD temp/fan monitoring problem described in the Hints.

- Check the core RRD graphs for cpu usage, load average, memory and swap usage, ...

- Make sure your SATA disk is running in native mode.

- ...

Sorry, real life intruded...

I applied the suggestion for the RRD issue and the pausing appears to be gone. I am running a slightly faster CPU (Athlon XP +2600) with 1.5 GB of memory.

The nvidia driver is 173.14.09 according to nvidia-settings.

Any other thoughts on my previous post regarding the color issue?

Try adjusting it with nvidia-settings.

I have tried several different settings several times. Is there any color bars program or jpeg for X w/ TV out?

It almost looks like the new drivers are overdriving the colors

Spending some more time and clearing the cobwebs I remember doing something I saw during R5F27 to clean up garbled audio. This was run as part of the directv.pl script where another script was called. This cleaned up the audio as well as video. I am not sure how/where I stumbled upon it but I think that is what I am missing in R5.5. Does anyone remember this and can point out the topic?

Is your problem only with recordings or everything on the display? You weren't terribly clear on this point and I've been assuming the more general problem. If it's only recordings you need to adjust the capture device.

DOH! You are correct, I was not clear. You are also correct that it was my input, specifically my PVR-500.

You also solved my problem of how to change this with your previous posts regarding change_tuner scripts. I reset my external tuner script so it was doing the other script in front of the directv.pl script.

After doing all of this nothing changed but at least now I could easily muck with stuff. The blues being green and the reds being magenta was the clue. I had saturation variable set to 63, changed it to 70 and the reds are red and blues are blue.

The only thing left to resolve is the "flashing" of closed captions and position/info overlays. R5F27 and earlier did not have this "feature". This appears to be a sync problem where they will flash every 1-2 seconds for ~ 0.10 second duration.

Once again, tjc you the man Thanks!

OK, I still have no joy... As I mentioned before it looked like it was working but then I rebooted.

Now whatever I do with change_tuner0.sh regarding saturation or do with nvidia-settings they remember the settings but it does not appear to get communicated to ivtvctl. Did this change dramatically between F27 and 5.5?

The -Y and -y options are gone so what else changed? I see there is an /etc/sysconfig/ivtv directory but the cfg-0 file just seems to set the tuner and whether it is NTSC/PAL. There is also the /etc/init.d/set_ivtv_params startup script but I am clueless and already feel I am straying far afield of where I should be...

/tmp/changer0.log does not complain after I removed the [yY] options