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Full Version: Video stalling with new Nvidia card
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Hi all,
I am running Lubuntu 12.04 with kernel 3.2.0
I was previously running an old AMD video card with the ATI Linux driver and was getting reasonable performance on SD channels with software decoding and no interlacing. I decided to upgrade to a Nvidia GT 520 because I heard it had all the capabilities needed to do hardware decoding of HD video.
I Installed the card and then used Ubuntu Jockey to install the 295.40 driver. It made me lose lightdm and was buggy initially so I purged and reinstalled the same driver. I have my Ubuntu base system accessable and the Nvidia-settings reports the graphics card and the driver correctly. I lowered the resolution back down to 800 x 600 to make it comparable to the ATI setup. I set the shader to advanced and enabled the Vdpau to hardware acceleration
What I am getting is stuttering of the image on live TV using TVheadend every few seconds and pixilation. The CPU is working at between 40-70% which is not what I was expecting since most of the decoding should have been offloaded to the GPU. The HD channels are about the same. I also have 100% CPU usage when live streaming movies - but playback is fairly smooth. The framerate has jumped from about 25fps to 50fps since replacing the card.

Something is not right here and it seems superficially that the card is not using its Vdpau capabilities. I have a slight suspicion that the Kernel is to old to work well with Vdpau but don't have enough understanding to be certain. However if I upgrade the Kernel then I have to re-setup my sat capture card from scratch and this provides my remote capabilities which is a real pain to setup.

Any ideas where to look for the solution Huh

Stephen
No Debug Log - no issue.
Upgrading to Nvidia 304 seems to have resolved the problem. Its a shame that Ubuntu lets a buggy legacy driver sit in their repositiory tro catch people out.

Stephen
Thought I had it cracked there for a bit as all went well last night for a while.
However this morning I went to change channels from TV to a radio station and the system crashed rebooted and then went back to the TV. Since then it has degraded to the point that when my TV headend client startsup its channel and EPG data it crashes and reboots when it tries to initialize the first station.
The basic Crashlog shows nothing obvious and the debugging feature will not initialize before the system crashes out again. There was a general Ubuntu crash message which said that my dpkg was outdated and needed by TVheadend but upgrading that made no difference.
I attempted to switch off all the hardware acceleration so that I could restart them in sequence - but they wont stick because the system crashes every time.
It seems to be a problem with TVheadend since I can start a DVD before the crash happens so the video rendering is somewhat OK.

Similar issues have occurred in Kodi before, and I have had them myself at times, but it seems there are multiple sources for the error so little systematic way of approaching it.

Stephen
Please - your long text is worth nothing - we need a Debug Log
I managed to get the debug working, which gave me the clue that it was a problem with the music visualization startup on Music switch. I had my visualization set to waveform and I changed it to default OpenGL Spectrum. This has cured the problem with switching between TV and Radio and it also works fine when switching to CD playback.
So problem seems to be solved for the moment, will see if it beds in over the next day or so.

Stephen