Mailing List Archive

Remote Controls / Stability
Hi all, I have a couple questions.
What kind of remote controls are you guys using?
What software?

Also what kind of performance are you guys getting with your setups, please
note your cpu/memory size/video/tv card/resolution/codec. I recently (last
night) put together an XP1800,
256 MB Ram, geforce 2 video card, hauppauge wintv, 640x480, rtmjpeg.
The problem is that I am still getting stutters sometimes while watching TV.
Playback is fine.

One last note, how stable has mythtv been for you? I seem to have crashes a
little too often, not sure why. It does behave the same way on two different
machines, two different distributions.


Calvin...

P.s.
Hopefully I'll ge to the freetype 2 code this weekend. :-)
Re: Remote Controls / Stability [ In reply to ]
On Friday 04 October 2002 12:51 pm, calvinharrigan@earthlink.net wrote:
> Hi all, I have a couple questions.
> What kind of remote controls are you guys using?
> What software?
>
> Also what kind of performance are you guys getting with your setups, please
> note your cpu/memory size/video/tv card/resolution/codec. I recently (last
> night) put together an XP1800,
> 256 MB Ram, geforce 2 video card, hauppauge wintv, 640x480, rtmjpeg.
> The problem is that I am still getting stutters sometimes while watching
> TV. Playback is fine.

See this thread:
http://www.snowman.net/pipermail/mythtv-dev/2002-September/000368.html

> One last note, how stable has mythtv been for you? I seem to have crashes
> a little too often, not sure why. It does behave the same way on two
> different machines, two different distributions.

Current CVS is quite stable for me right now. If you have more details on
what's happening, I'd appreciate that.

> Calvin...
>
> P.s.
> Hopefully I'll ge to the freetype 2 code this weekend. :-)

Excellent.

Isaac
Re: Remote Controls / Stability [ In reply to ]
> On Friday 04 October 2002 12:51 pm, calvinharrigan@earthlink.net wrote:

>> Also what kind of performance are you guys getting with your
>> setups, please note your cpu/memory size/video/tv
>> card/resolution/codec. I recently (last night) put together an
>> XP1800, 256 MB Ram, geforce 2 video card, hauppauge wintv, 640x480,
>> rtmjpeg. The problem is that I am still getting stutters sometimes
>> while watching TV. Playback is fine.

I have a similar system and am also plagued by stutters. Setting the
resolution to 352x480 eliminates them, for either mpeg4 or rtjpeg.

Yesterday I put in a 7200rpm "WD1200BB" drive (previously I had been
using a slower 5400rpm Maxtor), but this didn't fix the problem.

Today I've discovered that the "interleave" setting is not enabled for
my RAM. Allegedly you can interleave using only one dimm (why they
don't just do wider loads I dunno), so I'm going to try and turn that
on. But memory bandwidth seems an unlikely candidate; interleaving
reportedly gives maybe a 10% improvement.

My chipset is a VIA KT266. There are scattered reports of VIA's PCI
implementation being awful; this article describes a bug that may very
well cause the jitter I've seen - the jitter seems to appear on the
*record* side, which is the side with the most data sloshing over the
bus. (The jitter is in the recording, not randomly happening at
playback time).

http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/index.html

This article describes some of the register changes to make, but I'm
hoping someone has already bolted these workarounds into the kernel
and I just haven't got them yet.

>> One last note, how stable has mythtv been for you? I seem to have
>> crashes a little too often, not sure why. It does behave the same
>> way on two different machines, two different distributions.

I get crashes very occasionally, but then I run an older version. I
mapped a button to "killall -9 mythfrontend" on my remote; only
occasionally do I have to use it.

--
Grant Taylor - gtaylor@picante.com - http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/
Linux Printing Website and HOWTO: http://www.linuxprinting.org/
Re: Remote Controls / Stability [ In reply to ]
> My chipset is a VIA KT266. There are scattered reports of VIA's PCI
> implementation being awful; this article describes a bug that may very

So making the register changes described below does seem to have made
an improvement. I can now run using mpeg4 at 480x480 without getting
jitter. Larger resolutions still don't work, possibly due to my
conservative memory settings.

http://www.networking.tzo.com/net/software/readmes/techvl019d.htm

I translated this web page from English to Bourne Again, in case
anyone else wants to try this:

#! /bin/bash

dev='00:00:00'
go=false

r=0x76
echo -n $r: ' '
v=`pcitweak -b -r $dev $r`
s=$(( $v & ~ 0x30 | 0x10 )) # set bits 5,4 to 01
printf '0x%02x => 0x%02x\n' $v $s
$go && pcitweak -w $dev -b `printf '0x%02x' $r` `printf '0x%02x' $s`

r=0x70
echo -n $r: ' '
v=`pcitweak -b -r $dev $r`
s=$(( $v | ( 1 << 2 ) )) # set bit 2 ; PCI Master Read Caching
s=$(( $s | ( 1 << 1 ) | ( 1 << 3 ) )) # set bit 1 and 3 ; PCI Delay Transaction
printf '0x%02x => 0x%02x\n' $v $s
$go && pcitweak -w $dev -b `printf '0x%02x' $r` `printf '0x%02x' $s`

r=0x94
echo -n $r: ' '
v=`pcitweak -b -r $dev $r`
s=$(( $v | ( 1 << 6 ) )) # set bit 6 ; PCI Mas Rd Cac Probe T1 option
printf '0x%02x => 0x%02x\n' $v $s
$go && pcitweak -w $dev -b `printf '0x%02x' $r` `printf '0x%02x' $s`

r=0x75
echo -n $r: ' '
v=`pcitweak -b -r $dev $r`
s=$(( $v & ~ 0x0f )) # clear bits 3-0 ; PCI Arb Timer cleared
printf '0x%02x => 0x%02x\n' $v $s
$go && pcitweak -w $dev -b `printf '0x%02x' $r` `printf '0x%02x' $s`

r=0x4b
echo -n $r: ' '
v=`pcitweak -b -r $dev $r`
s=$(( ( $v & ~ 0xf0 ) | ( 1 << 7 ) )) # bits 7-4 to 1000 ; UpCmds over VLink priority change
printf '0x%02x => 0x%02x\n' $v $s
$go && pcitweak -w $dev -b `printf '0x%02x' $r` `printf '0x%02x' $s`

r=0x42
echo -n $r: ' '
v=`pcitweak -b -r $dev $r`
s=$(( $v | ( 1 << 4 ) )) # set bit 4 ; undocumented stabilization tweak
printf '0x%02x => 0x%02x\n' $v $s
$go && pcitweak -w $dev -b `printf '0x%02x' $r` `printf '0x%02x' $s`



--
Grant Taylor - gtaylor@picante.com - http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/
Linux Printing Website and HOWTO: http://www.linuxprinting.org/
Re: Remote Controls / Stability [ In reply to ]
On Fri, 2002-10-04 at 23:53, Grant Taylor wrote:
> > My chipset is a VIA KT266. There are scattered reports of VIA's PCI
> > implementation being awful; this article describes a bug that may very
>
> So making the register changes described below does seem to have made
> an improvement. I can now run using mpeg4 at 480x480 without getting
> jitter. Larger resolutions still don't work, possibly due to my
> conservative memory settings.
>
> http://www.networking.tzo.com/net/software/readmes/techvl019d.htm
>
> I translated this web page from English to Bourne Again, in case
> anyone else wants to try this:
>

Just wanted to let everyone know that I was able to get rid of the
stuttering on my box by upgrading the kernel to 2.4.19. I was running
.18 before. Turns out the chipset on my motherboard wasn't being
properly recognized by the kernel. I had to do some other kernel hacks
after the upgrade to get everything going. No big hacks just a few
lines posted to the kernel message board by the ide driver guy. Don't
you love open source!!! :) I also fine tuned my bios to give the best
performance. The most important/effective was increasing the pci
latency, 128 for me. Turns out by doing so you increase the effective
bandwith of the pci bus, there was a side effect, just can't remember
right now. No ill effects yet. I knew it couldn't be a cpu issue
because I was only using like 45% CPU in TV view mode. Running at
640x480 requires the capture card to spit out over 18 megabytes per
second, so I figured a little more bandwidth couldn't hurt.


Calvin...