Video choppy regression? Nvidia? on stable

[neodeb]

First of all I will never buy another Nvidia card. But I don't know if end of line for the 304 driver is related.

I have four computers that utilize the Nvidia 304 driver on their similar cards. Every damn one of them started stuttering and play video choppy. Especially 1080; but also 720 movies.

Now I had upgraded a SSD before the problem started. Therefore; I put the now older (cloned from) original SSD in my media computer and guess what? No video stuttering (at 1080) and it was fine. Until I (deb stable) upgraded it and bam! Stuttering and suspect CPU over usage is back. I was using VLC and noticed it had some upgrades(in that batch). But Videos (totem) player also stutters; just a little less worse. VLC used to be best. So I don't know if some upgrade took them both out. THe media computer GPU gets overheated and shuts down.

On one of my other boxes I was just trying to play online videos (480p or less) and that system also overheated and shut down! It never does that and has been one of my most stable and quiet. So upgrades are actually killing my computers and that is not stability on Deb stable.

Bugs reports are extremely confusing as these type of bugs are supposed to be fixed in the past. So regression? How can I tell?

All this has gotten EXTREMELY complicated on a STABLE OS. I run stable to avoid all this. I don't know where to start. Please help.

[stevepusser]

I agree that it shouldn't happen on Stable. But not knowing what you upgraded that might have caused this makes finding the cause very difficult, if not impossible. The right way to approach this would be to just update the minimum amount of packages at a time, which Synaptic makes easy, then try and find the point at which the upgrades caused your video to go bad.

Right now, all you have is a history log of updates in /var/log, which probably has a kazillion packages listed in it.

[tmsd]

I had the same problem, it seems most of the VLC devs just have fast enough PCs and didn't notice the increasing amount of CPU it took decoding videos. I never tried totem, but mpv solved this issue for me (though it is still too slow for h265 video in 1080).

[Wheelerof4te]

Therefore; I put the now older (cloned from) original SSD in my media computer and guess what? No video stuttering (at 1080) and it was fine. Until I (deb stable) upgraded it and bam! Stuttering and suspect CPU over usage is back. I was using VLC and noticed it had some upgrades(in that batch). But Videos (totem) player also stutters; just a little less worse.

I would first see if the drivers are correctly up to date, and if nvidia-driver is used instead of free nouveau.

Code: Select all

lspci -k

should tell us which drivers are used. VLC got upgraded to version 3.0 a while back, even in Stable (to fix security bugs easier). I don't know if nvidia-driver got updates, it should not be the case, excluding point-release updates.

[neodeb]

I never had nouveau stay working; so until now (year +) used the nividia-304 non-free driver.

I was noting in this thread; going back to older backed up system played 1080p vids well. So it was software.

For the past year I had some success using different players; but occasional overheat protection system shut downs. I tried adding a fan and redoing the thermal paste to no difference. Occasional shut downs.

BTW: This month; I wrongly thought enough extra months had passed to try upgrading to the new stable Debian 10 Buster.
While nouveau showed signs playing 1080; it was still too buggy.
Deb 10 dropped nvidia-304 by using xorg 1.20. Gone.
So I replaced the Nvidia GPU with a AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6670. It worked VERY well in Mint 19.2 as a test and let me know it's a capable and working card(I thought died). However Debian 10 does not, with black screen, cursor and ghostly flashing text. Tried and check many things.

NOTE: Testing another system, with a built-in AMD 300 series GPU, it works perfectly with Deb 10; but is to weak for video playing.

Conclusions:
Nouveau never completely worked. Always gave it a chance. Never worked.
Nvidia legacy (304 driver series and soon more) with Debian 10 on can't work.
AMD open drivers can work much easier; but I'm working out a microcode (I think) issue with Debian 10.

[CwF]

Use synaptic as stevepusser suggest and under File>History there is a very nicely formatted easy way to review your changes. Some cli and gdebi actions will not be listed there, but you can search the history without parsing through log files.

The comments on horsepower might be a main point. I have an old FX1500 and a 750Ti and they perform almost the same being backed by big xeons. I've noticed that playing videos with either is fine, and raises the cpu core temps 10-15C while the gpu temp is nearly unchanged. On a similar machine with HD77-7900 level AMD's performing similar, however the cpu cores stay cool, the gpu is what heats up. This suggest in my cases AMDGPU works, nouveau doesn't. With the cpu's to push it, I don't notice issues even with multiple monitors and multiple streams on either, just temp differences. My E3 xeon with gpu beats them all.

I'll also vote for mpv. VLC is a pig to fat to jog.

[stevepusser]

Depending on your hardware and drivers, most reasonably modern GPUs, even integrated Intel chips, support hardware accelerated video decoding. I only am familiar with Intel and va-api, but it does help a lot when you get it working--and it's often easy to break it with backported packages, so you have to be careful there...but I can play 4K h.265 videos in QMPlay2 or mpv with no extra CPU cycles used on a UHD 630 Intel GPU..

AMD GPUs seem to work using the same va-api method as Intels, while Nvidia uses vdpau, I think. Troubleshooting the HWaccel does currently require using the terminal.

[neodeb]

Thanks for the reminder; that synaptic has an easy history viewer.

I did not try any backports at first; when trying to get AMB 6670 GPU microcode to work, with all the suggestions I could find. Then afterwards; I finally tried the buster-backport firmware, driver and then even 5.0 kernel.

I may soon put a test clean install of Deb 10 live mate on a partition; just to see if this GPU works on buster "out of the box"; like it should.

I went above and beyond the call trying to define why the AMD microcode wouldn't load on my upgraded Deb 10 (now gone). I would not assume I overlooked stuff. The planets refused to line-up, and it just became ridiculous.

I've been with Debian since Potato. This is the very first time; that I could not find WHY something did not work. I guess the black screen was the firmware not loading. It could've been something silly. Like a monitor miss-match. I was going to try a custom xorg.conf; but Mint doesn't even use one and it works there.