[isamudaison]

UPDATE: Solved, as per post #7 (disabled on-board intel sound, updated BIOS)

debug log

When watching a movie, I find that after roughly 1.5 hours the video 'pauses' for 5~20 seconds, but the audio plays perfectly (see line 1315 in the log). I have sync to display enabled, with the video clock being the master, and drop/dupe audio packets... note I do NOT enable pass-through.

Any thoughts? Doing a google search I did find this guy who seemed to be having similar problems and cleared it up by 'changing resolution' on boot, but the majority of posts I've found about it all seem to relate to radeon chips (this is an ion2 box).

[astropolak]

This post describes the exact same problem, failed to get any sympathy from the devs here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=186585

[isamudaison]

It seems like this PR: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/2777 might be related. The interesting thing is I have the same build on my GT520 machine that does do pass-through and this doesn't seem to be a problem... that machine is also running 13.10, though as well as newer nvidia drivers. I'm thinking of wiping the ion2 box and installing 13.10 minimal with gotham and newer nvidia drivers. I've eliminated the 'network' as the culprit by upping the cachemembuffersize so that I *always* have video to render in memory.

[fritsch]

Reproduce with a local file, if network stalls for long enough, your buffer will run empty.

[isamudaison]

I've copied the file over, I'll have to run it tonight after I go to bed (I'm not going to watch that gawd-awful movie again)... I did find this piece interesting (albeit a bit old):

http://cybernetnews.com/xbmc-troubleshoo...ng-issues/

One particular piece, the amount of ram allocated to the integrated graphics... this seems like it would affect both me and @astropolak (as he has an i3 integrated gpu). I'll reproduce on local storage, and then take another look at my BIOS settings. After that I'll start upgrading components one-at-a-time to see if anything 'fixes' it.

[isamudaison]

Now this is verrrry interesting...
http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=11137.0

It looks like Ubuntu (v12.04 at least) loads the incorrect network driver (his scenario is exactly what my machine is reporting)... the ethernet controller is 8168, but ubuntu loads the driver for 8169... I wonder if this has anything to do with it. This is the *second* time ubuntu has F'd up the network driver (previously it loaded an ass-old driver version of e1000e for my intel 82579V and caused it to drop UDP packets heavily).

However, I'd like to repro using local storage before I change anything (the driver update will be the first thing to update).

[isamudaison]

Ok, here's the debug log with the file on the local drive (SSD):

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=139663

It's still happening (see line 1345). This eliminates the networking as the problem (even though the 'wrong' driver is installed). It seems like the renderer is randomly having a tough time?

I'll follow through updating/checking these components at a time:

BIOS - BIOS update was available (for this machine). Asus had no description on what had changed, though. There were no in-bios settings for adjusting shared memory (I'm not sure if ionx works that way, it seems like it actually has 512mb dedicated vram). Additionally, I noticed the on-board (intel) audio was still enabled, I disabled that as well. debug log *gasp* not a single warning while actually playing back the file. This makes me highly suspicious of intel's audio drivers for ubuntu.

Video driver - <findings>

xorg.conf - <findings>

Various system-wide latency inducing problems - <findings>


Please feel free to post suggestions.

[isamudaison]

@astropolak, have you tried switching to a low-latency or realtime kernel?
http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/intel_hd...time_howto

[astropolak]

@isamudaison, I like your attitude you do not give up easily, do you?
I have disabled on board audio - no fix.
My M/B is Gigabyte and I have 1GB Video Ram configured.
My Kernel is 64 bit and I use Saucy Ubuntu release, this is significantly different to your config.
I can also easily reproduce the problem, in about 10% of my ISO's by simply clicking to the next chapter few times.

So far nothing I've tried helps, network is definitely not the issue - I get 70 MB/s transfers ( I use autofs with NFS shares).

Not willing to try modified kernels, problem likely to be Xbmc or system level drivers.

[nickr]

System level drivers ARE part of the kernel!

[isamudaison]

@isamudaison, I like your attitude you do not give up easily, do you?
I have disabled on board audio - no fix.
My M/B is Gigabyte and I have 1GB Video Ram configured.
My Kernel is 64 bit and I use Saucy Ubuntu release, this is significantly different to your config.
I can also easily reproduce the problem, in about 10% of my ISO's by simply clicking to the next chapter few times.

So far nothing I've tried helps, network is definitely not the issue - I get 70 MB/s transfers ( I use autofs with NFS shares).

Not willing to try modified kernels, problem likely to be Xbmc or system level drivers.

Ah now it's starting to make sense. I've noticed that ''skipping" around in a video can exhibit the effect, I've gotten used to that My issue was when you let a movie play, not touching any controls, it would do the 'pausing' of video. I suspect for your problem you'll want to wait & re-visit when they go into the full-blown beta phase for gotham. I *am* still interested in researching a low-latency or RT kernel, though (in fact, I wonder if they selected one for xbmcbuntu or openelec?)
If you're using a computer that can take a discrete video card, I'd recommend the new nvidia gt 630 rev. 2... *the* new htpc card, it seems (and even on my gt 520 I don't see nearly as much 'pausing/lagging' when skipping around as on my ion2 machines).