Hi all,

I recently bumped my PVR350 box from a old 0.1.9 ivtv / old 2.6 kernel to 
the 0.4.2 release and 2.6.14 kernel (gentoo hardened-sources, fwiw). Also 
now using the 0.10.6 xdriver.

After some fudging the non-xvideo ivtv stuff works as perfectly as the old 
release, but I'm having trouble getting smooth playback using the xv 
output.
The symptom is a "stuttering" of the video feed; every 1~2 seconds 
(the interval does not change, regardless of motion) the video seems to 
pause for a few frames before resuming. From what I can observe no frames 
are dropped, it is just a short (but very annoying) periodic playback 
pause.
This is on a PAL board using mplayer dev-CVS-060217 (from gentoo portage) 
on a Epia V8000 board (800 MHz). The CPU never goes above 50% and mplayer 
does not complain about my system being too slow.

The last mention of issues like this that I can find is this thread:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/ivtv/devel/23811
>From September '05. Now I've tried the suggestions in the thread 
(increasing YUV buffers), I've tried most other patches that seemed 
promising from the lists, I've tried recompiling the xdriver with 
optimizations, I've tried eliminating any audio issues (-ao null), I've 
tried about 30 different video files of differing resolutions and 
encodings. I've tried all I can think of. The problem persists.

The reason I call this a drama is that, apart from the stuttering, the 
video output is the most drop-dead gorgeous TVout I have ever seen. I swear 
if I ripped a DVD to CD size, downsampling the resolution, the rip played 
through xv would look better than if I played the DVD on my standalone.

Using the X11 output (-vo x11) gives the old familiar tearing when a lot of 
the frame changes, as well as unscaled output, and slightly higher CPU 
usage. But no stutter. I believe the cause is somewhere in the IVTV yuv 
playback code.

Now, I'd been waiting for a major mythtv release to upgrade this system. I 
was hoping ivtv would be able to facilitate smooth video playback by then. 
Not to diminish all the hard work by the developers, but is there anything 
I can do to make this happen? If not, is there atleast any notion of what 
the problem is / the timeframe to resolve it? (Are all the devs busy 
merging with DVB / mainline kernel?)
Or should I just give up and switch to the EPIA's builtin, exceedingly 
crappy, but accelerated and non-stuttering Trident Cryberblade/il TVout?

Thanks,

bbee

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