[mythtvnz] The dreaded 'prebuffering pause'

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 9 Jan 2010 20:32:53 +1300, you wrote:

>
>Howdy,
>Can someone give me some pointers on resolving this?
>
>During live tv viewing I'm getting constant prebuffering pause warnings in the 
>log, with their associated audio and video stutters.
>
>When watching live tv, mythfrontend is at around 105-110% CPU time according 
>to top. Myth FE and BE are on the one box.
>
>I've compiled mythtv from source: 
>http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/branches/release-0-22-fixes/ mythtv-0-22
>and patched with the mythtv_ffmpeg_r20504.diff patch. I can minimise (but not 
>eliminate) stuttering by switching to Alsa:HDMI but then I would prefer to use 
>the 5.1 setup I have. I have tried every option in the audio setup, but still 
>the stuttering persists.
>
>I can play back DVDs without any (apparent) issues.
>
>Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EG41MF-US2H (embedded Intel G41 video)
>RAM: 4gb interleaved DDR2 800
>CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo (E7500) 2.93GHz
>USB DVB-T card: AverTV Volar Black HD (afatech AF9015 firmware loaded)
>
>This is on a minimal install of OpenSuse 11.2 64 (just X and TVWM - no Gnome 
>or KDE installed/running).
>
>I haven't yet checked to see if XvMC is working/installed yet - I'm googling 
>that now as I have no idea what it is or how it could help.
>
>Any ideas anyone?
>Thanks
>John

Is this stuttering problem when trying to play back DVB-T HD
recordings?  If so, then it is probably simply that you do not have a
fast enough CPU, as there is no accelerated H.264 video support for
Intel GPUs that I know of yet.  Your CPU may be just fast enough to
play back 720p recordings from TV1 and TV2, but it is not fast enough
for 1080i from TV3.  So you probably need an Nvidia card in order to
use VDPAU to offload the H.264 playback onto the GPU.