[Mplayer-dvb] Re: Reproducible MPlayer Crash with dvb-t

[David Maslen]

Haven't managed to subscribe to this list, so apologies for the cut and
paste reply.

Nico Sabbi nsabbi at tiscali.it 
Tue May 11 16:28:30 CEST 2004 

>the error you see below is due to the fact that mplayer didn't read() 
>fast enough from the
>DVB drivers, which overflew.
>This is logical if  your system isn't fast enough to handle the load.

The system does seem fast enough to play dvd's and other video files,
so I think the processor and disk speed are adequate. I have seen error
about system being to slow, but only while accessing a DVB stream, not
when reading from disk.

>>The Mplayer session immediately ends, and won't start again until I
>>reload the kernel module dvb-bt8xx. (rmmod then modprobe).
>

>this sounds like a bug in the dvb drivers (either bttv or dvb-bt8xx).
>Does tzap -r + mplayer /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0  work correctly when you

>have this problem?

Not had a chance to try this yet. Will do soon. That would be something
to report to the standard kernel bugs process?

>Maybe using your network card triggers something that raises the
>system load?
>Is your disk very slow? Something in 2.6.x  seems to have a similar 
>effect on my system:
>every massive I/O on the disk seems to almost paralize my PC; I
>suspect anticipatory scheduling, so I'll try to disable it.
>Are you sharing interrupts?

Last night I tried disabling the parallel and serial ports, which
change the interupts. The BT878 driver is now sharing with some USB
drivers, but they aren't being used con-currently.

I also changed the PCI latency in the bios from 33 to 128. 
This seems to have created some instability in my system, with
Windowmaker reporting a SIG11 bug. However I switched to open box and
kept testing.

Basically, it does appear to be continual ethernet card access on eth1,
which is not sharing a interupt, that causes the process to end
prematurely.

Once this has happened I need to reload the bt878 module, before I can
run mplayer again.

I also added echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq to my start up
scripts while I was at it.

I am using all 5 pci slots on the motherboard. I was wondering if there
were any point in moving the cards physically? I also saw an older post
which suggested in a motherboard with an agp video card, the first pci
slot should be left free. I could do this if I removed the ocasionally
used USB card. Would the first slot be the closest slot to the agp
card? Is there any point in trying this?

Finally on a related issue, the motherboard is a Asus P2B-F.
It's been a good board, but I'd consider replacing it with a new board
that was compatible with the CPU (Celeron 1400), Memory SDRAM and hard
disks (IDE). Anyone got a suggestion for a suitable replacement that
might have a faster bus and therefore help in my DVB reception?



=====
--
David..


	
		
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