I've been using Knoppmyth R5.5 for a while now, and I've had a few small issues that don't really stop me from using my system, but are still a little bit annoying:

Audio stutter in mythtv playback:
When I play back television recordings within mythtv, the audio will often stutter, pausing briefly anywhere from a couple times per second to once every several seconds. This happpens very frequently on recordings from analog channels and occasionally on recordings from digital channels. Interrupting playback (by rewinding, pausing, etc) and then starting it again will fix the problem (although it may take a couple of tries before playback goes smoothly).

Audio stutter in mplayer:
mplayer exhibits a similar sort of stutter when I play video files from outside myth. Unlike mythtv, this is not fixed by pausing and unpausing playback. Playback with xine works fine. Video playback from flash objects (youtube videos, etc) stutter like mplayer does. I have recompiled mplayer to allow playback of realplayer rmvb files, but this behavior was present both before and after I did this (as well as before and after installing flash).

Fastforwarding in digital recordings:
Occasionally my digital recordings seem to "fast forward" for a few seconds. Audio stops, and the video speeds way up for a few seconds, then goes back to normal playback. If I rewind and play that section again the same thing will happen. This only seems to happen on one channel (the local Fox station) that I've noticed, and happens maybe once or twice during an hour recording. I once had this happen while I was watching the program being recorded: the audio cut out, and the video became very stuttery, only displaying a frame or two per second.

ID3 tags in MythMusic:
Mythmusic seems to not recognize the ID3 tags on my mp3s, and is trying to use my directory structure and file names for the track, artist, etc (my file names are not consistent enough for this to be useful, however).

Volume reset on reboot: [solved]
The card I use for analog recordings has a cable that feeds the audio into my soundcard. However, in order for this to work I have to run alsamixer, and change the recording source to "line in" and turn up the volume. Any time I restart my knoppmyth box these changes are lost (and if I forget to do them again I wind up with analog recordings with no sound).

Help with any of these issues would be greatly appriciated.

Thanks.

Hardware:
- motherboard: Intel DG965WH
- audio: s/pdif on the motherboard's onboard card
- CPU: Core 2 Duo E6300
- graphics: Asus EN6200LE
- RAM: 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2-667 PC2-5300
- tuners: 2x hd-5500 (only one currently in use)

Dunno much about the the audio skipping problems you're describing, although I'm sure someone in here will have some helpful advice. I can help you w/ the alsamixer issue.

As you said, set the levels to your liking, then run:



That'll write the settings to a default config that should get loaded on a reboot.

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

That did the trick, thanks! I hope all of them are so easy to fix.

Glad to help. My experience with LINUX is that most little things are pretty simple to fix, the problem is often a lack of knowledge on my part/knowing what to tweak to get the effect. Oh well, that's the beauty of these wonderful forums, and the great user community tjat uses them

Also, google is your friend, the challenge there is knowing the verbiage to use to return relevant hit sets, particularly when it's a shell command that you don't know about!

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

Hmm, maybe I don't want them all to be quite so simple then; I'd look even more like a lazy bum.

Also, I just noticed that this thread talks about various patches for R5.5:


So maybe my video card is using the wrong driver. I will run the patcher when I get home this evening and see if that helps anything.

Edit: Ran the patcher, and it didn't magically fix anything.

For Audio stutter in mythtv playback- I've got the same graphics card, running on an AMD X2 3500. All of my TV is either a PVR150 SDTV (Dish network) or an HD5500 OTA (1080i and 720p)

I found setting the playback profile to 'CPU++' is really what stopped all the skipping and pausing. All of the others would work sometimes, and sometimes not.

Now- setting to CPU++ is going to make everything software decoded by default, so you need enough processor to handle that. Looks like in the near future, with a Geforce 8xxx and above, vdpau may be a seriously viable option to unload the cpu and instead use the GPU.

Let me know how that works. In the past few years I've played with playback profiles a lot, and things are really different in R5.5 - better because you can more easily use something different for each resolution (this used to be a manual DB entry), but definitely different.


*Edit* I'm wrong about using CPU++ to fix everything. I started watching Heroes last night and the sound and video was skipping like mad. I exited back to the recordings menu, restarted with no problems. Looks like you and I have the same problem. Doesn't happen very often though.

I hate to be a "me tooer" but I also experience the Audio Stutter issues and have since I installed 5.5. I must confess that 5.5 has been a bit less stable for my hardware setup than the last build.

I get sporadic backend crashes as well. At times, after watching an .ISO, switching back to regular tv or a recording yields no audio and I have to reboot to get the audio to come back. 5.5 also seems to hit my local hard drive more than prevoius versions, for reasons I cant explain. I used to be able to watch a program and do commercial flagging a the same time, but now it makes the program I'm watching a bit glitchy and the hard drive is working real hard. I'm also unable to watch some of the 1080p rips that I have as XVMC doesnt seems to be as effiicient as my last build of Kmyth.

I probably should open my own thread on this.. dont mean to hijack, just trying to add information is all..

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

Well I've got an update of my own. NOW I notice that the audio stutter is not limited to TV at all. Mythmusic, and watching video both stutter even more than TV. I had not noticed this previously because I don't use these features nearly as much (I serve my audio collection to the rest of the house from my backend).

I'm running a Chaintech AV710, but maybe I'll try dropping back to the onboard sound to see if it makes a difference.

Hoping for an improvement in R6.

I _never_ have problems with audio while watching an ISO with the mythtv internal player or a movie using Mplayer. The only time i have audio issues is like you, watching live tv or recorded shows. Now that you mentioned it, I have experienced stutter in music as well. I sorta feel like it's a Mythtv code issue not a Knoppmyth issue on the audio issues..

Are you by chance using optial audio out for all audio? I am..

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

In Australia, we often get the same content broadcast OTA on DVB in SD and "HD" on the same multiplex. What "HD" means depends on the station you are watching. Some do 720p others do 1080i. I have noticed lately that I am getting audio stutter on recordings made by SBS HD. I dont know if this has been the case since r5.5. I usually tape both the HD and SD stream, and when I have had this problem, just watch the SD stream. Most of the other HD content I watch is 1080i, so I wonder if there is an issue with decoding of progressive streams. I'm not with my system at the moment, but ill have a bit of a tinker and see if I can find some correlation.

You can examine the type of video in a file using mplayer -identify. You just need to work out which of the recordings is the problematic one.

ethernut: Yes, I'm using the optical out. I don't *think* I get this stutter if I switch to analog out, but I haven't tested thoroughly.

Greg: Excellent observation. Turns out for me it happens on both 1080i and 720p, but if I quit back to the menu and select that channel again, its clear. Sometimes (rarely) this takes 2 tries.

It is the latest sound drivers. The Chaintech driver has a 'regression' in the optical audio output, causing the symptoms you've described. If you have a Dragon, the "solution" is to switch to the built-in optical on your Intel board, which started working with these same drivers.

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Thanks Mike! It sure is nice to find the root cause. I don't have a dragon, but I'll try the digital out from my Nforce4 board. I know this is crystal ball territory, but does anyone foresee a fix for the Chaintek in the future?

My system is a Dragon, but I had already switched to the onboard audio (using the optical out) when I installed R5.5. Also, I have never had my mp3 playback stutter within MythTV, only videos. I believe that mp3s played from mplayer do stutter; I will check on that this evening.