Catalyst 8.10 audio problem via spdif on 780g

[ben0]

Just upgraded the catalyst driver in Mythbuntu setup from 8.4 to 8.10. My system is built around a Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H, which I'm using the integrated HD3200 GPU for display output. The audio is connected to my Yamaha receiver via an optical spdif connector, which I've configured in mythtv to passthrough ac3/dts to be decoded by the receiver.

When I tried to play a recording, the video hangs and my receiver, which normally displays the type of audio stream, whether ac3 or dts or pcm, via the lcd, gets crazy and starts cycling though all of them. It seems to me the 780g chipset is just outputting garbage on spdif and my receiver just didn't know what to do with it. The same thing happens with a 5.1 clip as well as a 2 channel one.

I then gave mplayer a try and it hung before opening a video window right when it's trying to detect the audio. I had mplayer set to use hwac3.

Any ideas? All of this used to be fine on 8.4 and broke right after I installed 8.10

[ben0]

went back to 8.9 and all is fine. Has anybody else seen anything strange with spdif on 8.10?

One thing they seemed to have fixed was the mythfrontend screen corruption (a.k.a. checkerboard of death) problem that we've had since 8.6. Mythfrontend worked fine in full screen with no corruption in 8.10. I had to do the windowed hack in 8.9.

[forum1793]

I have same board. 8.9 worked somewhat for me in mythtv. 8.10 seems to work same. The only problem I'm having is mythfrontend changes resolution and font such that I can only see part of menu options. Videos and TV are playing OK. Is there a simple fix for this?

For Myth under Default Video Player, I'm using "mplayer -vo x11 -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0". This should direct sound to hdmi sound but sound only is coming out optical. This was case for Catatlyst 8.9 and 8.10.

With 8.4 and previous version of mythtv I was getting sound out of hdmi.

Sound with 8.10 on xine is still working via hdmi.

Also, 8.6-8.8 gave me checkerboard problem. 8.4 may have worked best, I can't remember. 8.5 was what I was using for past couple of months.

I've also noticed a reduction in glxgears from around 2200 to 1600 moving to 8.10

[deanjo]

I've also noticed a reduction in glxgears from around 2200 to 1600 moving to 8.10

Please read, http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Glx...ot_a_Benchmark

[ben0]

I have same board. 8.9 worked somewhat for me in mythtv. 8.10 seems to work same. The only problem I'm having is mythfrontend changes resolution and font such that I can only see part of menu options. Videos and TV are playing OK. Is there a simple fix for this?

I don't have the same problem on my TV. Perhaps you can try to run mythfrontend in a window instead of fullscreen, if the latter was what you were running.

For Myth under Default Video Player, I'm using "mplayer -vo x11 -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0". This should direct sound to hdmi sound but sound only is coming out optical. This was case for Catatlyst 8.9 and 8.10.

With 8.4 and previous version of mythtv I was getting sound out of hdmi.

Sound with 8.10 on xine is still working via hdmi.

I believe I'm using alsa:spdif, which should alias to the optical out. I don't think there's an alias for hdmi. Perhaps the hardware device number changed between driver versions? If optical out is working for you, then maybe somehow my receiver didn't like what the computer was sending it. Something must have changed from 8.9 to 8.10. It was all normal again when I went back to 8.9. Before toying around with the new driver, I was using 8.4, which was fine as well.

Also, 8.6-8.8 gave me checkerboard problem. 8.4 may have worked best, I can't remember. 8.5 was what I was using for past couple of months.

I've also noticed a reduction in glxgears from around 2200 to 1600 moving to 8.10

[forum1793]

Maybe try, mplayer with mythtv not running.

from command line:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 <your mp3>
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 <your mp3>
mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.1 <your mp3>

These should output to hdmi, pc speakers, and optical respectively.

[forum1793]

I just tried:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif <my mp3>

This worked well for output to optical.

[ben0]

I just tried:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif <my mp3>

This worked well for output to optical.

thanks. I'll probably give it another try on 8.11, since 8.10, unfortunately, didn't sound like it had the features I was hoping for, which was mainly a fix for v-sync and working xvmc. I won't risk seeing my wife smug over saying that I broke the "dvd player" again

[ben0]

I finally figured out what went wrong with my driver upgrade. It was actually not the fault of the catalyst driver. The reason was that while I did the upgrade to 8.10, I had also ran the update manager in mythbuntu, which happened to have upgraded my kernel version from 2.6.24-19 to 2.6.24-21. That upgrade, as I found out today with yet another ubuntu kernel update, messed up the fglrx installation. This time, I had 8.9 driver installed. The way to tell was that xvinfo showed no adapters and fglrxinfo showed mesa libs.

The sound problem was likely because the cpu became too heavily loaded doing display due to the lack of xv, slowing down frame rate, and audio likely had to compensate. Since I was doing passthrough to my receiver, the latter probably got confused when the expected audio data wasn't arriving in time.

To test out the theory, I uninstalled 8.9 and reinstalled 8.10, which now showed proper xvinfo, and fglrxinfo now showed the proper radeon string. Playback is now normal along with the audio.

Anyway, one thing to watch out for when doing ubuntu updates is that it could mess up the catalyst drivers, and the way to fix it is a driver reinstall.

The other thing is that unfortunately, 8.10 still does not fix the mythtv screen corruption problem. The checkerboard pattern is still there. The reason I didn't see it before was because I was unknowingly not using xv.