Intermittent frontend lockups when using vdpau

[knappster]

I am using an arch-based OS called LinHES and I (and a couple other users) have experienced mythfrontend locking up using nvidia video cards with a VDPAU playback profile. The lockups are very intermittent (typically 1-5 lockups in a 1-2 week period). The only headway that I have been able to make is this:

Using a Geforce 210, I would get lockups with the 340 driver but not the 304 driver.
Using a Geforce GT 710 I am getting lockups on the 340 driver and the 390 driver.

The error that is in the frontend log consistently when this happens is:

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2018-07-31T13:29:50.542412-05:00 mythfrontend[4935]: E Decoder mythplayer.cpp:3503 (DecoderGetFrame) Player(5): Decoder timed out waiting for free video buffers.

I've personally only noticed it when playing mpeg-2 interlaced videos, including live TV, TV recordings, and dvd's. However, that is probably 95% of what I play, so it may happen on other videos without my knowledge.

I do not get lockups when using the mythtv pvr plugin on Kodi when using VDPAU acceleration, so it appears to be somewhat mythtv specific. I have ongoing posts on both linhes forums and nvidia forums (I would post the links but I am not allowed to).

The main LinHES developer has not been able to reproduce the issues despite having the Geforce 210 in multiple machines. The responses on the nvidia forum indicated that they are unofficially not supporting vdpau anymore. Is this something that can be addressed in the mythtv code? It has been reported when using mythtv 0.28 as well as 29.1. Please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide in order to help troubleshoot this.

[knappster]

I want to give this a bump since it is going on two weeks since posting. I've been using Kodi as a frontend in the meantime. Interestingly, while mythtv frontend plays back video smoothly regardless of what deinterlacer is used, Kodi struggles unless it is using Bob deinterlacer.

[pgbennett]

I have a Geforce 210 with nvidia driver 340. I have used this setup since I installed Ubuntu 18.04 in May. I am not sure which driver I used before that. I have never had a lockup or timeout waiting for free buffers with this setup (many years). I have a two computers with this card.

I don't know what the issue could be. There are changes in latest MythTV master that allow decoders to have a bigger overlap between decoding and rendering, to fix the issue with Android of running out of decoder buffers.

You can try with master frontend. Alternatively you can switch to OpenGL Slim profile, which bypasses VDPAU and will give about the same level of performance on even old slow hardware, at least with

Note that current master frontend will work with v29 backend. This is not always the case but as of now it will work.

[knappster]

Thanks for the response. I haven't been able to figure out why some machines are experiencing this while others are not. It seems like I ran across a thread with a similar issue that was due to overheating. I'm fairly confident that it is not the issue in my case. However, I'm not sure if the card could be getting throttled for some reason. I will look into compiling the frontend from master as a comparison.

[knappster]

Sorry I haven't done anything yet. I've tested OpenGL and it seems just a bit glitchy. Would the master frontend still be compatible with v29 backend if I attempt to compile it this weekend?

[knappster]

FYI, I just updated to mythtv 30 yesterday. Since my original post, I've been using kodi as a frontend and it worked quite well using temporal deinterlacing. The kodi issue I reported earlier turned out to be a refresh rate issue rather than deinterlacer (Once changed from 60 Hz to 59.94 Hz, the problem went away). I am going to go back to using mythfrontend with VDPAU as my primary frontend to test my original issue with v30 and will report back if I experience these lockups again...

[knappster]

Just happened again on v30:

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2019-02-17T14:37:15.257575-06:00 mythfrontend[4504]: E Decoder mythplayer.cpp:3824 (DecoderGetFrame) Player(4): Decoder timed out waiting for free video buffers.