multiple dxr3 cards issues

[Costa Tsaousis]

Hi,

I have a dedicated gentoo system installed with 3 dxr3 cards who feed 3
RF modulators via their tv-out and audio-out.
I use this system to create 3 private TV channels that broadcast movies
around the clock.

All the movies being played are MPEG2 video with ac3 or mp3 audio. All
files have been encoded with mencoder.
Playback is handled by mplayer.

Kernel is: 2.6.24-gentoo-r4
em8300 is: a cvs checkout of early May 2008
Mplayer is: dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.1.2 (latest gentoo install)
The 3 dxr3 cards are not the same H/W version (I could not find 3
identical cards)
The system has a P4 Celeron at 1,8Ghz (system load is 0,20, while cpu is
70%-95% idle)

I have this system running for several months now, however there are a
few glitches which I cannot figure out how to resolve:

1. A/V are not in sync. In most cases A/V is 1/2 to 1 second out of sync.

2. Frequently enough, video playback is not so smooth either, though not
on all channels, but also not a specific one. It happens randomly on any
of the 3 channels. Initially I thought this happened because movies
start and stop asynchronously and mplayer seems to lock the entire
em8300 system (all cards) when starting a movie on one of them. So I
synchronized this start/stop by issuing a pause on the 2 channels when
one of them is going to start a movie. This however has not cured the
problem.

3. One of the cards, seems to have an issue showing video as interlacing
(I don't know how to describe it more accurately. It is an artifact,
since my LCD screens do not flicker, but the video appears broken
compared to the other cards, giving the effect of
interlacing/interleaving on the edges of subtitles or other sharp
objects). I have read a very old discussion that this has been solved,
however I still have it on one of my cards. Of course, this is a low
priority issue - I can always buy another card.

Also, my kernel logs are full of such lines:

[4141833.622061] Fifo still full, trying stop
[4142214.943358] Fifo still full, trying stop
[4142710.509420] em8300_video.o: Video sync rdptr is stuck at
0x00012cc3, wrptr 0x00012cc8, left 5
[4142710.509836] em8300_video.o: Video sync timeout
[4142975.589700] em8300_video.o: Video sync rdptr is stuck at
0x0002204c, wrptr 0x00022051, left 5
[4142975.590135] em8300_video.o: Video sync timeout
[4143100.899085] Fifo still full, trying stop
[4143138.421232] em8300_video.o: Video sync rdptr is stuck at
0x0001ab96, wrptr 0x0001ab9b, left 5
[4143138.421634] em8300_video.o: Video sync timeout
[4143454.252576] em8300_video.o: Video sync rdptr is stuck at
0x00038f45, wrptr 0x00038f4a, left 5
[4143454.253046] em8300_video.o: Video sync timeout

I have also tried the various versions of firmwares shipped with the
official windows driver. No luck.

I am really stuck. Any help is appreciated.

Regards,

Costa


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