FreeBSD and NVidia

byrnejb

byrnejb

FreeBSD-12.1p10

NVidia GT730

I have encountered a problem with video / audio playback on my system. I have reported this problem earlier with respect to Fierfox and Youtube. I thought that I had it fixed. However, I did not.

This issue affects all video playback including mplayer. The symptom is that the video file loads but will not play. I can drag the slider and see the frames go by but the video will not play as such.

Excepting that I reinstalled the latest nvidia-driver package and restarted the system. I started the GDM (mate) and opened firefox. I went to youtube and opened a video. It played, with sound. So I thought that I had the problem solved. However when I went to Youtube later and tried to play a video the original problem manifested itself.

It also seems that there may be some problem in relation to the sound as well. When I went to Youtube and tried to play a video it would not play. But, a sound similar to static came from the speakers for a few seconds and then stopped. I have not been able to reproduce this effect.
 
SO, I restarted the system and now video and sound work. I will monitor to see if the problem resurfaces.
 
I had a similar problem: video does not play. It just displays a single frame. In my case the sound hardware was the real issue!
No sound at all, the not working sound jams the video playback. I solved this by setting the sound hardware to "polling mode".
 
Some background information: Video players have to synchronize video and audio streams (and also other streams, like subtitles, if present). One of the streams has to be used for the reference time, and the other streams are synchronized to that reference stream. Most (all?) players use the audio stream for the reference time by default, because the audio hardware automatically “swallows” the audio data at the appropriate speed (e.g. 48 kHz), so the player software doesn’t have to do anything special to get the correct playback speed. It just has to synchronize the other streams (the video stream in particular) with the audio stream.

Consequently, if the audio playback hangs (for whatever reason), the video stops altogether, because everything is synchronized to the audio. The cause could be a problem with the audio hardware driver, or maybe something isn’t configured correctly, or it could be in some part of the software (pulseaudio, alsa, whatever).

The Nvidia hardware or driver – as the thread title suggests – is certainly not the culprit in this case.
 
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