[CelticWhisper]

I recently replaced my old projector (ViewSonic PJ503d @ 800x600 over VGA) with a new HD projector (Acer H6510BD @ 1920x1080 over HDMI) and have been having trouble getting some videos to play smoothly. Audio seems fine and is connected over a plain 3.5mm stereo connector to an old Creative Labs SoundBlaster card.

The PC is running Ubuntu 14.04LTS on an AMD Athlon II X2 245 (Regor) with 16GB DDR2 800 and an onboard GeForce 8300GS. I have never had issues playing back anything h.264 or older at any resolution, including raw BluRay transport streams, on the old display. I'm now seeing issues with both HD and SD video.

Not sure if it's relevant or not, but I also have a problem with a garbled display if I power on the HTPC prior to powering on the projector.

Nothing has changed except the projector itself and the connection between it and the PC (going from VGA to HDMI). Is this something to do with HDMI syncing or some kind of HDCP problem? Not sure what to make of it.

[nickr]

debug log (wiki)

[DaVu]

The problem with HDMI and NVidia is, that if NVidia doesn't recognizes a device (and the pj will need more time to 'boot' up), it won't connect anymore. So your HTPC has always to be the last device in the chain which is turned on.

For the smooth playback try a setting...set "change refresh rate to match video" to "at start/stop". I guess your new PJ is capa le of 24p playback which your old one wasn't and if the refresh change doesn't match, it might stutter a bit.

[fritsch]

HTPC needs to be first?

AVR + TV needs to be first ... so that the PC can detect those when they are already up and running.

[CelticWhisper]

Debug log is at http://xbmclogs.com/phdvn6iae

I also SSH'd in and noticed that kworker was maxing out one of my cores. Followed some guides on running traces and discovered that the dmesg log shows a TON of "NAK Bailout" errors. This is supposedly related to Nouveau somehow. When sitting at the HTPC I saw a fair few "System error detected" dialogs and reported the errors that came up - one regarding Xorg and one regarding GTK.

Is it worth trying the Nvidia binary drivers since these errors all seem to be display-related? Maybe I'd see better results going over HDMI that way?

Thanks.

[nickr]

You should certainly be using the nvidia drivers.

[DaVu]

HTPC needs to be first?

AVR + TV needs to be first ... so that the PC can detect those when they are already up and running.

Please re-read

So your HTPC has always to be the last device in the chain which is turned on

@CelticWhisper

as nickr already said...use the correct drivers:

20:41:41 T:140332103133184 NOTICE: GL_VENDOR = nouveau
20:41:41 T:140332103133184 NOTICE: GL_RENDERER = Gallium 0.4 on NVAA
20:41:41 T:140332103133184 NOTICE: GL_VERSION = 3.0 Mesa 10.1.3
20:41:41 T:140332103133184 NOTICE: GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION = 1.30

nouveau is not supported.

Here is a ppa with lots of nvidia drivers:

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/...ubuntu/ppa

[fritsch]

Yeah, no hw acceleration with your current drivers. Install nvidia binary drivers and libvdpau.

20:41:41 T:140332103133184 NOTICE: GL_VENDOR = nouveau
20:41:41 T:140332103133184 NOTICE: GL_RENDERER = Gallium 0.4 on NVAA

[CelticWhisper]

Thanks, all - will be trying these suggestions. A few requests for clarification:

David1977: The native "Hardware Drivers" preferences (once called jockey, I think?) does list proprietary Nvidia binary-blob drivers. Should I be using the PPA you supplied anyway, or only if I didn't have the option in "Hardware Drivers" control panel?

fritsch: Does libvdpau need to be explicitly installed separate from the nvidia binary drivers?

General request: I'm also noticing that I have no access to UPnP streaming with this HTPC as a source if I boot it "headless" (i.e. projector connected over HDMI but not powered on) - an issue I never had with an analog video connection. Is there any way around this? I have a couple of other Kodi boxes that I'd set up to stream this HTPC's library and would like to be able to do so without needing to run a projector that won't be used in other rooms.