[AG-TECH] Not finding Firewire DV on UQ advanced vic

[Andrew Ford]

On 5/30/07, leon zadorin <leonleon77 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "videos"? How many streams are you receiving on that machine? I though
> it was only 1 :-) Generally speaking, it would be best to start
> testing with only 1 stream... then if things don't work with more
> streams - we will be able to "narrow" things down a little :-)


Oh, there were 2 total. The second one was just an idle h261 stream from
when I was trying 2 instances of vic on the same machine. I'm not testing
that anymore.

yeah... in fact all of the things you describe (e.g. "freezing") is
> very like the "underpowered machine" behaviour... but in such cases
> the "freezing" is not really "freezing", just vic working on existing
> data (frame assembly, decoding and rendering) and not being able to
> complete things in time... so all of the "window redrawing", user
> key/mouse input get queued by the X server, but not processed by the
> application... The only thing is... the "top" output would/should list
> vic or Xorg running at close to 100% and the leonlog2 file which you
> have emailed to me earlier appeared to list vic only using a small
> fraction of CPU resources... and Swap appears not to be used...
>
> Just to clarify a little detail - when you were generating leonlog2
> file - was vic running at a time and trying to process video streams
> (i.e. was it started with the IP/PORT address on which there was a DV
> video stream transmitted from another machine)?


Yeah, it was attempting to receive a DV stream. I can receive h261 and the
like perfectly fine. The lack of CPU usage does seem strange, and I have
replicated it (see below)

Just to be sure:
> 1) On the machine that is working for you - start streaming a DV stream.
> 1,1) Generally speaking, whet testing, start with only 1 stream being
> transmitted on a given multicast address - if it works - you can
> always start adding more video streams later on.
> 2) On the machine which freezes vic:
> 2.1) Open 2 terminal windows
> 2.2) In one of the terminal windows start "top"
> 2.3) In another run vic... (for testing curiosity, try with the
> following switches):
> 2.3.1) ./vic IP/PORT
> 2.3.2) ./vic -g IP/PORT
> 2.3.3) ./vic -g -x IP/PORT
> 2.3.4) ./vic -g -x -i IP/PORT
> 2.3.5) run ./vic without any command line options to see what those
> switches do and what other new options have been added to vic...
> 2.4) whilst executing any of the 2.3.1 to 2.3.4 steps - have look at
> the "top" output (from step 2.2) and see how much idle system time it
> is reporting (with may be how  much CPU vic and Xorg are using)...


2.3.1) ./vic IP/PORT: main window doesn't render or respond to input, like
before. CPU usage is interesting... when I do something that should cause
the window to update (like mouseover a button), vic's CPU usage shoots up to
10-20% and Xorg's goes up a few. This lasts a couple seconds then goes back
to normal (normal being around 90% idle and vic & Xorg using <1%)

2.3.2) ./vic -g IP/PORT: main window still mostly unresponsive - sometimes I
can get the video window to pop up but it doesn't render frames from the
stream, it's just gray. Without the video open, vic and Xorg use about 40%
CPU apiece, and if the video window is open, it's more like 80%/5% for vic &
Xorg respectively.

..and before I could do the rest of these tests our sending machine's video
card just apparently died. If anyone has a somewhat reliable/on
most-of-the-time DV stream (sending over UQ vic of course) available so I
could do more thorough testing that would be great.

If you feel like it - email me your xorg.conf ... also, which linux
> are you using (distro, kernel version [uname -a])... ?


 xorg.conf is attached. I'm running Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (edgy) with kernel
version 2.6.17-11-generic.

--Andrew
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