Radeon vdpau xbmc sometimes fails to display anything when starting playback

[oliver]

Hey all,

not at all sure where the problem lies or how to start debugging, but here goes.

I'm running mesa 9.2.0 and a 3.10.10 kernel on gentoo. I'm on XBMC 12.2-rc1 and on the frodo branch of xbmc-addon-pvr for the tvheadend backend. I tested vdpau load on the Radeon 6450 by enabeling and disabeling it on my core2duo box and noticed a difference of about 40 - 50% cpu usage, so it's working well when it works.

However sometimes media freezes XBMC, as in the channel list stays on the screen, the preview is showing the default background, but nothing moves anymore. It can't even be exited, switching VT works fine. The tvheadend shows that the front end is actively streaming and consuming bandwidth. My ssh session shows nothing strange and tvheadend log shows:
20:54:45 T:139676966975232 NOTICE: Creating audio thread
20:54:45 T:139676898666240 NOTICE: Thread CDVDPlayerAudio start, auto delete: false
20:54:45 T:139676898666240 NOTICE: running thread: CDVDPlayerAudio::Process()
20:54:45 T:139676966975232 NOTICE: Opening teletext stream: 1 source: 256
20:54:45 T:139676966975232 NOTICE: Creating teletext data thread
20:54:45 T:139676890273536 NOTICE: Thread CDVDTeletextData start, auto delete: false
20:54:45 T:139676890273536 NOTICE: running thread: CDVDTeletextData
20:54:45 T:139676966975232 NOTICE: Opening video stream: 0 source: 256
20:54:45 T:139676966975232 NOTICE: Creating video codec with codec id: 2
20:54:45 T:139676966975232 NOTICE: CDVDVideoCodecFFmpeg::Open() Creating VDPAU(704x576, 2)
20:59:08 T:139678088361728 ERROR: AddOnLog: Tvheadend HTSP Client: ReadResult - request timed out after 4 seconds
20:59:08 T:139678088361728 ERROR: PVR - GetEPGForChannel - addon 'HTS Tvheadend:10.2.0.3:9982' returned an error: server timeout
20:59:08 T:139678088361728 ERROR: PVR - GetEPGForChannel - cannot get EPG for channel 'BBC Radio 3' from client '1': server timeout
20:59:08 T:139678088361728 ERROR: EPG - Update - failed to update table 'BBC Radio 3'
20:59:11 T:139678088361728 ERROR: PVR - GetEPGForChannel - addon 'HTS Tvheadend:10.2.0.3:9982' returned an error: server error
20:59:11 T:139678088361728 ERROR: PVR - GetEPGForChannel - cannot get EPG for channel 'tv8' from client '1': server error
20:59:11 T:139678088361728 ERROR: EPG - Update - failed to update table 'tv8'

While it's possible that the backend is failing, but the backend doesn't know it. The failures seem to me more about EPG requests for deleted/inactive channels.


So while I investigate further, anybody notice similar behavior?

[oliver]

Ok upgrading the kernel to 3.11 but I've narrowed it down to vdpau.

Was really obvious too, with vdpau, livetv, without it works fine. Strangly recording from the same tvheadend server work just fine. So something in the live stream format that causes vdpau to choke.

Xorg.0.log reveals nothing however, no crashes, no locks nothing. XBMC appears to continue as usual, without image. Switching to a VT and back, makes the screen entirely black. Interestingly enough, you hear about half or maybe even a full second of audio.

[oliver]

radeon uvd is still pretty flaky, vdpau via mplayer seems to work the best.

the VLC devs seem to think it's AMD's broken vdpau implementation.
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/9281

Ok that's very good to know. With 3.11 i'm getting far better results so far. It actually plays

I'll keep you posted, as 1 channel is just a little light for testing